The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #310 - Neil Degrasse Tyson

00:00:01.000 You know, we're early.

00:00:03.000 I gotta tweet this, Brian.

00:00:05.000 Tweet it!

00:00:05.000 Because we're early.

00:00:07.000 So while we're on the air, I'm gonna tweet. 0.99

00:00:09.000 Because the beginning of this shit, no one's on it anyway. 0.98

00:00:12.000 Who's the first sponsor? 0.98

00:00:13.000 Why don't you talk about your website?

00:00:16.000 Why don't you plug DeathSquad.TV, Brian.

00:00:19.000 Okay.

00:00:19.000 I'm doing this.

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00:01:17.000 That's O-N-N-I-T. Don't go to O-N-I-T because it's a totally different company. 1.00

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00:01:59.000 Neil deGrasse Tyson does not know about the Bulletproof Coffee.

00:02:03.000 We'll have to educate him.

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00:02:15.000 Why Killer Bee Honey? 1.00

00:02:16.000 Because it sounds cool to have.

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00:02:19.000 I'm sure it's no better than regular honey.

00:02:21.000 In fact, it's probably worse than regular honey. 0.99

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00:03:05.000 Alright, that's O-N-N-I-T. Brian, cue the music. 1.00

00:03:14.000 With that doubt, it would not be official.

00:03:21.000 Neil Tyson, thank you very much for coming on here, man.

00:03:23.000 This is an honor.

00:03:24.000 This is a blast.

00:03:25.000 I think the universe is going to explode.

00:03:27.000 You are, for sure, the most requested podcast guest ever in the history of this podcast.

00:03:33.000 So, Brian and I have been doing this for three years, and we have come full cycle with your appearance here today.

00:03:39.000 I have felt the magnetic force of your fan base.

00:03:42.000 Pulling me in.

00:03:43.000 Are you sure that wasn't what the Mayans were talking about?

00:03:45.000 Are you sure that wasn't the universe aligning?

00:03:48.000 I was so happy when I saw you do this...

00:03:51.000 I forget what the interview was, but someone was talking about the alignment of the stars and the galaxies.

00:03:56.000 It's the first time in 20...

00:03:57.000 You're like, no, it happens all the time.

00:03:59.000 Yeah, it happens every year.

00:04:00.000 I told my friend Eddie Bravo, who's a beautiful human being, but he loves himself a conspiracy theory.

00:04:06.000 He loves that. 0.99

00:04:07.000 When I told him, I go, dude, Neil Tyson says it's bullshit. 1.00

00:04:10.000 He goes like this, oh... 1.00

00:04:12.000 It's probably bullshit though. 0.99

00:04:13.000 I don't want the authority of my academic pedigree to be what makes it bullshit. 0.99

00:04:19.000 I want to arm people intellectually so that they can then deduce that there's nothing to it.

00:04:27.000 So when someone says planets are going to align and Earth is going to die, I want to encourage them to ask, how often do planets align?

00:04:35.000 And then you get the answer every year.

00:04:37.000 So you don't even have to do the calculation. 0.95

00:04:39.000 Well, it's that shallow sort of interest in a subject where it only allows you to regurgitate the really juicy shit you heard about the planetary Relignment, which is so dangerous because when people are bullshitting, which is most of the conversations we get into, 0.87

00:04:55.000 we don't get into serious academic discussions with people who have actually done the homework. 0.98

00:04:59.000 You're just bullshitting with a dude at work, and he's like, yeah, I heard the fucking planets are going to align. 0.95

00:05:04.000 And it's like, they don't even know what's going to happen. 0.99

00:05:06.000 And you're like, whoa, what? 0.97

00:05:08.000 Then you go back to your cubicle, shitting your pants, going, are the planets going to fucking align? 0.98

00:05:12.000 Is something going to happen that's going to... 1.00

00:05:14.000 I tweeted recently that if you're really successful at bullshitting, it means you don't hang around enough people who are smarter than you.

00:05:21.000 That's a very good point.

00:05:23.000 I think one of the cool things about you and your approach to science is I think it's very refreshing that if someone doesn't know something, you're not condescending about it.

00:05:36.000 You're very enthusiastic about distributing the information, but you're not casting a judgment while you do that.

00:05:43.000 And that is something that I think has freaked a lot of people out about really intelligent people or scientists or someone who talks about anything where they have no experiences.

00:05:52.000 There's a sort of a condescending sort of a carrying of that knowledge that you don't have.

00:05:57.000 You make a really important point, and I... You know, there's the anti-intellectual movement in society and I don't blame them entirely for feeling that way because we all know people, I have many colleagues, where you try to hang out with them and They make you feel bad for not knowing what they know.

00:06:14.000 And if that's how you interact with people, why would anyone want to be that? 0.62

00:06:19.000 Well, it's a problem of associating with shitty characters. 0.97

00:06:23.000 They're not fun to be around. 0.95

00:06:25.000 And unfortunately, you're associating something that's incredible, like the actual measurement of the universe itself, you're associating that with annoying people.

00:06:35.000 Yeah, you've got to detach the content from the deliverer of the information.

00:06:39.000 I dated a girl and she loved Duran Duran, okay, when I was in high school.

00:06:43.000 And, you know, after the breakup, which always has in every high school relationship.

00:06:47.000 That was 80s, very 80s.

00:06:49.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:06:49.000 I was like, fuck Duran Duran, man. 1.00

00:06:51.000 Duran Duran sucks. 1.00

00:06:53.000 I could not enjoy their music because I associated it with this young lady. 1.00

00:06:56.000 Oh, oh.

00:06:57.000 You know, it's like.

00:06:58.000 You were psychologically scarred. 1.00

00:06:59.000 I fucked. 1.00

00:07:00.000 I couldn't enjoy Hungry Like the Wolf, Bad Boys, all those classics. 1.00

00:07:04.000 I removed them from the menu because of this one chick. 1.00

00:07:07.000 But that can happen with music that you actually would enjoy.

00:07:12.000 Well, forget about mathematics.

00:07:14.000 Right.

00:07:14.000 If it happens with that, it can happen...

00:07:17.000 With everything up the ladder from there.

00:07:20.000 You're very important.

00:07:22.000 I don't know if you know how important the cool guy scientist is.

00:07:26.000 I have evidence of how important that is.

00:07:31.000 I can't tell you how many emails I've got or tweets.

00:07:36.000 People say...

00:07:38.000 There'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?

00:07:50.000 Oh! 0.60

00:07:51.000 They resurrect the relationship because she then sees the potential for what the guy can do.

00:07:58.000 That's fascinating.

00:07:59.000 Wow.

00:08:00.000 Yeah, it's like, by any means necessary.

00:08:02.000 Whatever it takes.

00:08:03.000 Yeah, whatever it takes.

00:08:04.000 Whatever it takes to stimulate and inspire.

00:08:05.000 So I'm happy to glue people back together, if that's what matters here.

00:08:09.000 Well, you were the most important person when it came to the 2012 movement, because I was talking to so many knuckleheads. 1.00

00:08:16.000 I had a guy on the...

00:08:18.000 Remember Pinchback?

00:08:19.000 I was on the show.

00:08:19.000 Something's definitely going to happen.

00:08:20.000 It's like, he's quoting all these reasons why things are going to happen.

00:08:23.000 Well, people love them some end of the world.

00:08:25.000 I mean, that's...

00:08:27.000 They certainly do.

00:08:28.000 I was at a party and the person learned that I was an astrophysicist and walked up to me.

00:08:32.000 I hear you're an astrophysicist.

00:08:33.000 I said yes.

00:08:34.000 This is like a year ago.

00:08:36.000 The world is going to end in 2012. And then I explained why it's not.

00:08:40.000 He walked away dejective.

00:08:44.000 And I said to myself, what?

00:08:46.000 Some people are only happy when they're sad.

00:08:49.000 Yeah, there's a thing where people are trying to uncover mysteries, and it becomes more important than the actual mysteries of the universe itself.

00:08:57.000 It's weird.

00:08:58.000 You can do simple statistics on this.

00:09:00.000 So, for example, the world has been here for billions of years, and you think it's going to end in your lifetime?

00:09:05.000 That's awfully hubristic of you to think.

00:09:07.000 Yeah, it's pretty bold.

00:09:09.000 And even if it does, your world's going to end eventually anyway. 0.92

00:09:14.000 It's so silly to fixate on.

00:09:17.000 I think the most effective encouragement I gave people during the Mayan non-catastrophe was, I said, all right, between now and December 20th, just convince your Mayan catastrophe people to sign over all their assets into your name. 0.55

00:09:33.000 That's all.

00:09:34.000 Well, what's really crazy...

00:09:35.000 Very simple.

00:09:37.000 If they don't do it, they don't really believe what they're saying.

00:09:39.000 They don't believe.

00:09:40.000 And if they do, you get fabulously wealthy.

00:09:42.000 They're not going to give you that cash.

00:09:45.000 I'm sure some people did go nutty and set up shelters in the desert and go underground.

00:09:51.000 There's a lot of people that went nutty.

00:09:53.000 I did a little research on this.

00:09:55.000 About every 10 years, somebody comes up with an end-of-the-world scenario.

00:09:59.000 And keep in mind that end-of-the-world scenarios, no one says, the world's going to end in 150 years, right?

00:10:05.000 It doesn't work, because you can't gain adherence to your cult that you're building.

00:10:09.000 It's got to be kind of immediate, but far enough in the future so that you can prepare, but near enough so that you're not going to forget about it at any time. 0.87

00:10:17.000 And it's really good if you can base it on some old shit that very few people can read. 0.65

00:10:21.000 And everybody thinks that the old folks really understood the universe when in fact they did not. 1.00

00:10:25.000 Well, 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.

00:10:35.000 To think that way, I don't understand what's going on in those minds.

00:10:38.000 It's the same sort of thinking that wants to uncover mysteries and conspiracies.

00:10:44.000 It's a weird excitement to, like, hidden things.

00:10:48.000 Now, you were a moon guy for a while, right?

00:10:49.000 Yeah, well, listen, my issues with not believing that people went on the moon, a lot of it had to do with a friend who had an uncle who worked at Rocketdyne.

00:10:59.000 And this guy was convinced that there was no way to do it.

00:11:01.000 He was an engineer.

00:11:02.000 And he said they were so far away from doing it that the fact that they did it, and they did it seven times... 0.91

00:11:08.000 Since looking at it, the weight of all the evidence, I reserve the possibility that some things were horseshit based on a lot of photographic evidence that they did fuck with, like the Gemini photos. 0.93

00:11:20.000 Yeah, but here it is.

00:11:22.000 If you look at the fuel that was loaded up into the Saturn V rocket, you can calculate where that fuel could take that rocket.

00:11:29.000 It's to the moon and back. 0.91

00:11:31.000 So, they're not going to the Piggly Wiggly, right, in the Saturn V. No, I'm a retard.

00:11:36.000 Listen, if anybody has any real sense, they would look at it and say, there's no way that that was a hoax.

00:11:44.000 There's no way.

00:11:44.000 It would be harder.

00:11:46.000 See, people think it was actually hard to get to the moon.

00:11:49.000 Yes, it was hard, certainly, but it would have been way harder to hoax it.

00:11:55.000 Yes, today.

00:11:56.000 But the thing about hoaxing things back then, the thing that was so compelling to me was that hoaxing things back then was really sort of the way they did it.

00:12:04.000 I mean, that's how they got into the Gulf of Tonkin.

00:12:07.000 Oh, well, your fake news stories.

00:12:09.000 Yeah, there was a lot of fakery going on back then.

00:12:11.000 You're faking news.

00:12:12.000 It was the height of the Cold War. 0.97

00:12:13.000 And there was a lot of reasons why I thought some fuckery was afoot. 1.00

00:12:19.000 And especially all these goddamn documentaries. 0.99

00:12:21.000 Okay, so you say you felt justified just because the landscape in which... 1.00

00:12:34.000 Over and over.

00:12:36.000 Over and over, it was demonstrated.

00:12:39.000 The idea that they were able to do that in 1969, but haven't been able to repeat it since, of course, makes it even more delicious.

00:12:46.000 It makes it even more conspiratorial attractive.

00:12:50.000 And then the fact that the rock that they had given to Holland turned out to be a piece of petrified wood.

00:12:56.000 There was a lot of weirdness to the moon landing conspiracy.

00:13:01.000 And there was a lot of, not just...

00:13:04.000 People that admired it, but it was almost like a religious thing.

00:13:08.000 My friend called it a technological Jesus.

00:13:10.000 He said that if anything is scientific, you should be able to question it and someone would give you an answer.

00:13:16.000 But there's a bit of emotion and attachment and pride with certain historical accomplishments, like one of them being the moon landing.

00:13:24.000 That forbid people from actually questioning.

00:13:26.000 Well, it went beyond science.

00:13:28.000 It was a cultural achievement.

00:13:30.000 Did you ever read Clinton's quote?

00:13:31.000 What was it?

00:13:32.000 Clinton wrote a book, My Life.

00:13:35.000 Clinton man, not Clinton woman. 0.95

00:13:36.000 No, Clinton George.

00:13:37.000 What's Bill?

00:13:38.000 The guy who was the president guy.

00:13:39.000 George Clinton, that's the other guy.

00:13:41.000 His opinion is equally valid, by the way.

00:13:44.000 Those are two very different Clintons.

00:13:45.000 Yeah.

00:13:47.000 I'll find it here for you.

00:13:48.000 The quote, was it in his book, My Life?

00:13:49.000 Yeah, it was in his book.

00:13:51.000 And it was all on the...

00:13:55.000 The time where it happened, he was working with a carpenter.

00:14:00.000 Well, while you're looking at it, the way I reflect on people who say we didn't go to the moon, I say, what a compliment it is of our emergent culture, technological culture, that there are members of our society that are so impressed with what we achieved that they can't believe it.

00:14:18.000 Well, yeah.

00:14:19.000 So I take it as a compliment that people stand dumbstruck, awestruck, that it is beyond their capacity to believe it.

00:14:26.000 I don't think it's beyond their capacity to believe it.

00:14:28.000 I think if you had shown them documentaries that... 0.93

00:14:34.000 Didn't have any of the stuff that was in the shit that I saw, whether it was the moon, did we go, or there's another one, a funny thing happened on the way to the moon, where they just show over and over again all this fucked up footage, and it's very confusing to a non-scientifically minded person. 0.80

00:14:48.000 You can get on a long downward spiral. 0.97

00:14:51.000 And this Clinton quote, this fucks with me, just a month before Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague Michael Collins Aboard Spaceship Columbia and walked on the moon,

00:15:07.000 beating by five months President Kennedy's goal of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade.

00:15:12.000 The old carpenter asked me if I believed it happened.

00:15:15.000 I said sure, I saw it on television, and he disagreed.

00:15:18.000 He said that he didn't believe it for a minute, that those television fellers can make things look real that weren't.

00:15:24.000 Back then, I thought he was a crank.

00:15:26.000 During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that made me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time.

00:15:33.000 Yeah, look, that's a horrible quote to hear from the President of the United States if you're a confused young man and you think we maybe didn't land on the moon. 0.99

00:15:41.000 You read something like that and you go, what the fuck does that mean? 0.98

00:15:44.000 Well, plus people... 0.97

00:15:46.000 In total, give the government way more credit for organized behavior than they actually ever deserve.

00:15:54.000 I think they believe the government killed Kennedy.

00:15:57.000 And I think a lot of people believe that if they did that, they could kind of do a lot of things.

00:16:01.000 Yeah, I mean, so, okay, but, you know, science is going to move on while you're, you know, arguing that.

00:16:06.000 And so, yeah, that's what...

00:16:07.000 There's a point where you just say, all right, I gotta move on.

00:16:10.000 That's the other thing that makes the conspiracy so juicy, is that science didn't move on when it came to manned space landings.

00:16:16.000 That was the end.

00:16:16.000 Well, the engineering of it, yeah.

00:16:18.000 There was the political will.

00:16:20.000 It's money at that level, right?

00:16:22.000 And what all conspiracy theories have in common is that there's a point where you have to bridge a gap in the absence of Of actual data.

00:16:33.000 And an assertion gets laced upon it to satisfy the claim that it's a conspiracy theory.

00:16:41.000 So you say, well, this is true and that's true.

00:16:44.000 And the only way they can both be true is if this is covered up in between.

00:16:47.000 So somebody always has to say there's a cover up.

00:16:49.000 But when there's actual knowledge about the world, nobody has to talk about covered up information.

00:16:54.000 It's just there and writ large and ready to be absorbed and embraced.

00:16:59.000 I agree with you. 0.94

00:17:00.000 The reason why the moon theory is so juicy for people is because there's so much of this stuff that you could point to, and so much of it that looks like evidence of fuckery.

00:17:12.000 Take for example the assertion that the photos from the lunar surface, since the moon has no atmosphere than a daytime picture, If you're there in the daytime and the moon, you see a full night sky of stars, even with the sun in the sky as well.

00:17:27.000 You don't see stars in the daytime on Earth, not because they're not there, but because the atmosphere is aglow with scattered light from the sun.

00:17:36.000 If you take away the atmosphere, the sun will still be there, but the sky goes dark.

00:17:40.000 That's what the folks get when they go to the edge of the atmosphere, and they're calling that the edge of space.

00:17:44.000 But when you get to the edge of the atmosphere, the atmosphere is no longer between you and the rest of the universe, and the stars reveal themselves just as they would at night.

00:17:53.000 So everyone knew this.

00:17:55.000 So you see these photos from the moon, and there's Neil and Buzz and the lander, and there are no stars in the sky.

00:18:02.000 It's just dark.

00:18:03.000 And they'll say, see, it's fake!

00:18:06.000 And these are people who've never taken photography.

00:18:09.000 If you are exposed for the bright reflective light of the astronauts in the lunar surface, that camera exposure, even in the Hasselblads that they carry to the moon and use, is too short to take in the dim light from the stars of the night sky.

00:18:25.000 If you turn the camera to the sky, A much longer exposure with sensitive film.

00:18:30.000 You'll get the stars, but then you overexpose the stuff in the foreground.

00:18:34.000 So Photography 101 answers that question.

00:18:38.000 But there are huge websites given unto this.

00:18:40.000 And so what that told me was that people simply wanted to believe that it was a hoax.

00:18:46.000 And then made all the information fit that need without actually caring about the scientific truths that, with any evidence, would Disprove all of what they were thinking.

00:18:59.000 So at that point I said people just believe what they want.

00:19:02.000 And so my task was not to debate moon hoaxers as an educator.

00:19:07.000 My 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.

00:19:19.000 Or you get duped by someone who's exploiting the laws of physics for their own financial gain.

00:19:26.000 Excuse me.

00:19:27.000 They're exploiting your ignorance of the laws of physics for their own financial gain.

00:19:32.000 So I see science literacy as a kind of vaccine against all of the world around you that would just simply take advantage of your goodwill and good nature.

00:19:43.000 Certainly with things that can be easily explained, like you're talking about the light and the setting of the camera, all that stuff.

00:19:50.000 Yeah, but they led with that, and I explained that.

00:19:52.000 Oh, well, then, okay, well, then how about...

00:19:53.000 And they start going down a list, and, you know, time to go to dinner, you know?

00:19:57.000 Right.

00:19:57.000 So 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...

00:20:09.000 There was all sorts of compelling evidence that was really weird, like photographs from different spots on the moon, but they had the same backdrop.

00:20:16.000 And using this idea that they had done these inside some gigantic sound studio.

00:20:23.000 And when you see something like that on television, you saw Brian O'Leary, who is an astronaut.

00:20:28.000 And once again, it's on TV. Yeah, of course.

00:20:30.000 So there's the authority built into the medium.

00:20:32.000 And then talking to this dude's uncle, or him telling me what his uncle said actually, it was such a, you know, it's one of those things where you go, okay, we know they lied about this, we know they lied about that, they lie about things all the time.

00:20:45.000 The government lies all the time.

00:20:46.000 Jessica Lynch and, yeah, a million stories.

00:20:49.000 But the government have to lie as well as 10,000 scientists and engineers.

00:20:53.000 I mean, think about this.

00:20:55.000 Just think about this.

00:20:57.000 We knew more... 0.99

00:21:02.000 If there were ever a state secret that the government wanted to keep, it would be the behavior of President Clinton's genitals. 0.99

00:21:11.000 Okay? 0.97

00:21:12.000 But that got out.

00:21:14.000 That got out.

00:21:15.000 And only three people knew this.

00:21:19.000 Three! 1.00

00:21:20.000 All right?

00:21:20.000 You're going to hoax a moon landing by telling 10,000 scientists and engineers to keep it secret for 40 years?

00:21:27.000 That's not how humans behave.

00:21:29.000 Was it Lemony Snicket who said, I forgot who the author was of this quote, who said, the only way you can keep a secret between two people is if one of them is dead?

00:21:40.000 Mm-hmm.

00:21:41.000 But that's not true militarily.

00:21:42.000 We've kept big secrets for a long period of time.

00:21:45.000 Sure, but really delectable secrets don't last.

00:21:49.000 I can keep a secret that there's a bunker that I'm going to run to, sure.

00:21:52.000 But to keep a secret that aliens landed or DNA experimenting on us, that would get out.

00:21:58.000 That's what people do.

00:22:01.000 Lesser stuff than that gets out.

00:22:04.000 Well, when you hear things about Area 51 and the Robert Lazar interviews, have you ever heard of any of that stuff?

00:22:11.000 For it to be true requires that you say someone is keeping something a secret.

00:22:15.000 So you don't think that anybody's capable of keeping secrets?

00:22:17.000 Not on that level.

00:22:18.000 Oh, no.

00:22:18.000 I don't.

00:22:19.000 I completely disagree.

00:22:20.000 I think that friends can keep secrets.

00:22:23.000 Oh, sure.

00:22:23.000 Wait, wait, wait.

00:22:24.000 Yes.

00:22:25.000 I mean, the quote with the one has to be dead, that's an exaggeration.

00:22:27.000 Right, of course.

00:22:29.000 But beyond a certain number of people...

00:22:33.000 The conduct of human beings, if the secret is really juicy and really, really tantalizing, I think there's 0% chance that that's likely.

00:22:44.000 I disagree.

00:22:45.000 There'd be diaries and there'd be people telling their families, you know, like, we didn't go to the moon.

00:22:50.000 Look at the secrets we already know!

00:22:52.000 Look at the secrets that get out!

00:22:54.000 Yeah.

00:22:55.000 Listen, I mean, for sure, most secrets get out.

00:22:58.000 However, I absolutely think it's completely possible for people to keep secrets.

00:23:02.000 Actually, that's an experiment that you can't conduct.

00:23:05.000 Right.

00:23:06.000 Make a fake event happen?

00:23:09.000 No, no, no, no.

00:23:09.000 The statement, most secrets get out, for all you know, that's 100% of the secrets.

00:23:14.000 It could be.

00:23:15.000 Yeah, you're right.

00:23:16.000 It's just a simple, untestable fact.

00:23:18.000 Well, don't you have any secrets in your past that you got away with?

00:23:21.000 Sure.

00:23:21.000 A lot of people got away with some secrets.

00:23:23.000 Yeah, but I didn't tell it to 10,000 people and say, keep it a secret.

00:23:26.000 Well, the idea is that if you're talking about NASA, the idea about the moon landings was that it was compartmentalized.

00:23:31.000 And, you know, the big one is that Stanley Kubrick was the...

00:23:35.000 There's actually a documentary, a fascinating documentary. 1.00

00:23:37.000 Again, fucks with my head because, as I've always said, it's terrifying when you're too stupid to know who's dumb. 1.00

00:23:43.000 And that is often where I find myself when I'm watching these things. 1.00

00:23:47.000 And there was this documentary that was all about the different sort of techniques that Kubrick used in 2001. All brilliant and pioneering.

00:23:57.000 Yeah, he had changed the way you re-shot gigantic scenes by some new process called something about...

00:24:06.000 Front projection.

00:24:07.000 I think that was basically the name of the process.

00:24:10.000 And then he showed all the evidence of front projection footage in the moon landings. 0.97

00:24:14.000 And again, you're fucked because you're sitting here and I'm looking at this and I'm like, okay, who's right here? 0.97

00:24:20.000 Have you ever seen the video of the astronauts on trampolines? 1.00

00:24:23.000 No, no, I haven't. 0.90

00:24:24.000 I never thought in my life that I would be in the position to have a real astrophysicist watch a ridiculous video. 0.88

00:24:31.000 Oh. 0.71

00:24:31.000 And so I want you to, Brian, pull up astronauts on trampolines. 0.71

00:24:35.000 You're putting this up, okay.

00:24:36.000 You've got to see it.

00:24:37.000 It's beautiful.

00:24:38.000 I don't think I've seen it.

00:24:39.000 It's astronauts, and the conspiracy is that they are either on trampolines or they're on some sort of a wire harness because of the way they're moving, and that they're moving behind the lunar rover, and that's to hide either the trampoline or hide the movement of their feet,

00:24:57.000 like the way the shot is positioned. 1.00

00:24:59.000 And it's a motherfucker. 1.00

00:25:01.000 This one drives me bananas. 1.00

00:25:03.000 Check this shit out. 1.00

00:25:04.000 Here it is. 1.00

00:25:04.000 I'm checking it out. 1.00

00:25:05.000 Now watch this.

00:25:06.000 We were going to do a bunch of exercises that we had made up at the Lunar Olympics.

00:25:14.000 Show you what a guy could do.

00:25:15.000 Doesn't that look like a guy just got yanked up in the air?

00:25:18.000 Check this out.

00:25:20.000 About 380 pound guy, that's pretty good.

00:25:22.000 They threw that out.

00:25:26.000 Yeah, jump flat footed straight in the air.

00:25:37.000 That ain't any fun, is it?

00:25:40.000 That ain't very smart. 0.96

00:25:43.000 I mean, obviously, if you're a person who's not scientifically inclined, and you're prone to conspiracy theories, guilty of both, and you see something like that, you go, what the fuck is going on there? 0.92

00:25:53.000 Is that really the moon?

00:25:55.000 Are they really jumping around like they're on trampolines?

00:25:57.000 It looks like a guy's getting yanked up by wires on the moon?

00:26:00.000 Well, I'm just saying, you look at the trajectory of the Saturn V rocket.

00:26:04.000 That's nice, but that doesn't mean a person was in it.

00:26:07.000 When you watch that, doesn't that look weird, though?

00:26:10.000 Well, okay, you're saying if you don't know what the laws of physics would do on the surface of the moon.

00:26:14.000 Yeah, one-sixth gravity when you're watching this.

00:26:16.000 Doesn't that look weird to you?

00:26:17.000 Okay, so I understand how susceptible one can be when you're confronted with what is given as evidence.

00:26:26.000 Yes, yes.

00:26:27.000 And if I don't otherwise come across that way, I am sensitive to that.

00:26:32.000 Right.

00:26:33.000 I'm...

00:26:36.000 If you don't otherwise have the tools to analyze information, then one is susceptible to all manner of forces of thought that go on around you.

00:26:51.000 By then, for me, I don't have the energy to fight all of that.

00:26:54.000 Right, of course.

00:26:55.000 I just teach people how to think about information, and then I walk away.

00:27:00.000 And then they make a life where they vote for whoever they want.

00:27:04.000 But they've got intellectual defenses.

00:27:08.000 And so that's that.

00:27:10.000 There are other people who take them on head-to-head.

00:27:12.000 Like Michael Shermer, a big skeptic.

00:27:15.000 Yes.

00:27:15.000 And more power to him.

00:27:17.000 He's got the patience and the...

00:27:19.000 He's got good analogies and he can present to you the psychological evidence of why we're susceptible to this.

00:27:26.000 He's got a whole book called Why We Believe Weird Things.

00:27:29.000 Do you think it's weird to look at that video and think it looks odd?

00:27:33.000 It'd be weird if you otherwise knew that a 33-story rocket filled with fuel launched from Cape Canaveral, took several orbits around Earth, Went to the moon, took pictures from the front side of the moon,

00:27:49.000 the back side of the moon, images from the surface of the moon.

00:27:53.000 A week later, it comes back.

00:27:55.000 An aircraft carrier goes into the Pacific to pick up a capsule out of the ocean.

00:28:02.000 People get out of the capsule, get on the spacecraft.

00:28:05.000 The president meets them.

00:28:07.000 Life magazine writes profiles.

00:28:10.000 That's all emotional.

00:28:12.000 After you get to a certain point, I'm just saying it builds.

00:28:14.000 And then someone shows you a video and says, well, maybe all of that was all fake.

00:28:19.000 Well, you know, the idea is not even that it all didn't happen.

00:28:22.000 The idea proposed in the Kubrick documentary was that the footage was fucked up and that they made a lot of extra footage.

00:28:29.000 And then a lot of what you see is faked footage where they were worried that they weren't going to be able to do it, so they decided to fake it, and some to see if they could fake it, that there was two schools of thought.

00:28:38.000 Okay, that's a whole other thing.

00:28:39.000 That says we did go, but they needed a movie director to help out the...

00:28:46.000 Do you ever see the Michael Collins photos?

00:28:48.000 These are really annoying, but I'll show them to you.

00:28:51.000 This was a Gemini 10 spacewalk, but it wasn't really a spacewalk.

00:28:56.000 It was a simulation, and they just blacked out the background.

00:28:59.000 NASA used it as press clippings.

00:29:02.000 So when conspiracy people get a hold of that, they go, aha! 0.99

00:29:06.000 Which is probably just they needed a photo, they didn't have one, the fucking guy really did spacewalk, duh. 0.99

00:29:11.000 And they just decided to just do a little fuckery. 0.99

00:29:14.000 Just say the guy's walking around space. 0.52

00:29:17.000 The closest photo on the shelf, yeah.

00:29:19.000 And it's pre-Photoshop, so that's quite a job.

00:29:21.000 Pre-Photoshop, yeah.

00:29:21.000 They painted it, right?

00:29:23.000 So you see something like that with your knowledge of physics and with your understanding of vacuums and zero gravity.

00:29:30.000 That doesn't look...

00:29:31.000 Oh, it's completely straight.

00:29:32.000 It's completely...

00:29:33.000 It looks totally normal.

00:29:34.000 Well, yeah.

00:29:34.000 It depends on how quickly they return to the ground.

00:29:37.000 I mean, these are...

00:29:38.000 You have to sort of judge that.

00:29:40.000 And so...

00:29:43.000 But, you know, I'd want to see more.

00:29:45.000 I mean, this is a pretty tight shot and other things.

00:29:49.000 You want to look at how far away the horizon is.

00:29:51.000 The moon is smaller than Earth.

00:29:54.000 So I want to see if dust was kicked up and does the dust fall at the slower rate that the astronaut falls?

00:30:01.000 I don't see the dust in this, so I'd say this is not enough information.

00:30:04.000 If I was cold, presented to this...

00:30:06.000 So if somebody made this...

00:30:07.000 Because you can't put wires on dust, right?

00:30:10.000 And suspend the dust and have it descend as slowly as an astronaut bouncing dust.

00:30:15.000 Right.

00:30:15.000 So you mean like the Lunar Rover dust?

00:30:17.000 Yeah, or every time they stepped, the dust came up.

00:30:20.000 So you'd look at all of these cues, and there's so many cues that would happen naturally, if it actually happened, that you'd have to think up and get perfectly...

00:30:32.000 To fool an expert who knows what they're looking at.

00:30:35.000 If they know what it's like.

00:30:36.000 That's why it would have been easier to simply go to the moon than to fake all of that.

00:30:41.000 That's my point.

00:30:41.000 This is the one where it looks like the guy gets yanked up by a wire.

00:30:44.000 Have you ever seen this?

00:30:45.000 Check this out.

00:30:46.000 The guy's on the ground.

00:30:49.000 Look at this.

00:30:52.000 Yeah, he fell forward and just popped back up.

00:30:54.000 Yeah.

00:30:55.000 What people, I think, especially people like myself, would have to wrap their heads around, I guess, is that this isn't just a vacuum, but it's also a vacuum and one-sixth Earth gravity.

00:31:07.000 Precisely.

00:31:07.000 So you're dealing with a completely alien environment.

00:31:10.000 So how much do you weigh right now?

00:31:11.000 190. 190. You're packing it in there, huh?

00:31:15.000 You're saying I'm fat.

00:31:16.000 How rude.

00:31:17.000 Neil Tyson just said I'm fat.

00:31:18.000 Don't make me show you my six-pack, son.

00:31:21.000 The Budweiser on the side of the table.

00:31:23.000 How rude again.

00:31:26.000 This is damaging to my confidence.

00:31:29.000 So you have muscles to accommodate your 190-pound body. 1.00

00:31:33.000 Fuck yeah, I do. 1.00

00:31:34.000 Look at that shit. 1.00

00:31:37.000 So now let's add a 200 pound pack on you, backpack. 1.00

00:31:40.000 So now you weigh 400 pounds.

00:31:42.000 Right.

00:31:42.000 Well, he said 335, but I'll give you that.

00:31:44.000 Okay, yeah, just round it.

00:31:45.000 That's what he just said.

00:31:46.000 Just get big round numbers.

00:31:48.000 Okay?

00:31:49.000 So let's say you now weigh 420 pounds.

00:31:53.000 You're slugging your way.

00:31:54.000 You're sluggish here on Earth.

00:31:55.000 Right.

00:31:56.000 I put you on the moon.

00:31:57.000 Your muscles that normally are accustomed to 190 pounds now are...

00:32:01.000 Now are carrying, are maneuvering, are lighting, manipulating one-sixth of 420 pounds, which is 70 pounds.

00:32:18.000 Right.

00:32:18.000 Imagine how awesome you would be.

00:32:21.000 How awesome you would look.

00:32:21.000 If you weighed 70 pounds.

00:32:22.000 If you have this musculature and you weighed 70 pounds.

00:32:25.000 You'd be Superman.

00:32:27.000 You couldn't crack an egg though. 0.94

00:32:28.000 You'd hit people.

00:32:28.000 They'd laugh at you.

00:32:30.000 You would be Superman.

00:32:32.000 You'd have to have really good technique.

00:32:33.000 You would pop up.

00:32:34.000 You would just on your toes.

00:32:36.000 You'd jump to the ceiling.

00:32:38.000 So it's cool.

00:32:40.000 So what I'm confusing is what would happen in an Earth's environment.

00:32:45.000 That's your life experience, so this is the bias you bring to it.

00:32:48.000 It's an understandable bias, and that's what makes the moon an otherworldly place.

00:32:53.000 So 70 pounds, you literally could spring up as if you were pulled by a cord, like you would look like. 0.98

00:33:00.000 You could spring better, because the cord has to make you Feel like you're 70 pounds, but now you are 70 pounds, so you just do it.

00:33:08.000 I really enjoyed Mythbusters' version of it.

00:33:10.000 They went into depth about flag waving, and I thought it was really fascinating to watch where they actually created a vacuum and had the flag wave in a vacuum.

00:33:19.000 And it's weird because it doesn't...

00:33:21.000 You know, we have an idea in our head of what it looks like when a flag waves.

00:33:26.000 Well, that's obviously the wind moving that flag.

00:33:28.000 But there's wind here.

00:33:30.000 There's nothing.

00:33:31.000 There's zero atmosphere.

00:33:33.000 Now, when someone would run by a flag in zero atmosphere, does it create any wind?

00:33:39.000 Is there anything?

00:33:40.000 Nothing.

00:33:41.000 So if a guy hops by a flag and the flag blows in the breeze, what's causing that?

00:33:46.000 Is that a faked footage?

00:33:48.000 Or is it a fake video?

00:33:50.000 Yes.

00:33:50.000 If you walk by a flag in...

00:33:52.000 No, it has nothing to do with zero G. It has to do with no atmosphere.

00:33:56.000 So you walk by a flag, there is no breeze that That is left behind you in the wake of your steps.

00:34:02.000 And depending on how much air you displace, things next to you might respond to that.

00:34:10.000 If there's no atmosphere, no.

00:34:11.000 There's no way to get that information to the flag.

00:34:13.000 So Brian, pull that up.

00:34:14.000 Pull that up.

00:34:15.000 Flag blowing in the breeze.

00:34:16.000 I'll tell you the video it is.

00:34:18.000 No, so what you have here is with the American flag that's set up there, there's sort of residual stiffness to the flag.

00:34:24.000 How might you?

00:34:25.000 There's residual stiffness to the beam that has to hold the flag, otherwise it would hang limp.

00:34:30.000 Yeah, there's a shaft through the top of the flag.

00:34:32.000 Exactly.

00:34:33.000 There'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.

00:34:45.000 So maybe space is not a place where flags belong.

00:34:49.000 Whoa.

00:34:50.000 Yeah.

00:34:52.000 Apollo 15, this is the one.

00:34:55.000 It's really fascinating because they stick it into the ground, and then the dude hops by it, and when he hops by it, it wiggles in the breeze.

00:35:03.000 There you can see clearly that the shaft is over the top of it.

00:35:05.000 No, he had just stuck it in the ground.

00:35:07.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:35:07.000 The shaft is in it, and it's in place, and it's still sort of reacting to the environment.

00:35:13.000 Sure.

00:35:14.000 Now watch what happens when the guy gets behind it.

00:35:16.000 Now he's sort of moving along and he gets in front of it.

00:35:20.000 And when he hops in front of it, the flag follows him like it goes in the breeze.

00:35:29.000 How long is this video?

00:35:31.000 No, nothing touches anything.

00:35:33.000 Pull it ahead.

00:35:34.000 Well, if it does move, the evidence would suggest that something touched it.

00:35:39.000 Right, you would say.

00:35:40.000 Right.

00:35:41.000 So something...

00:35:42.000 See how close his foot is to the base of the...

00:35:44.000 Yeah, that's not where the video is.

00:35:45.000 Keep going, though, Brian.

00:35:46.000 Keep going.

00:35:47.000 Get it to the part where the guy goes around.

00:35:52.000 He's taking some pictures here.

00:35:53.000 Right, so here...

00:35:54.000 It would have been much better if we queued this up.

00:35:56.000 Queued up to, like, right there.

00:35:58.000 Okay, so watch.

00:35:59.000 Okay, back it up.

00:36:00.000 You missed it.

00:36:01.000 So now it's wiggling.

00:36:05.000 Just get it to right when the guy hops in front of it. 0.99

00:36:11.000 Dude, you suck at YouTube. 0.99

00:36:12.000 You really suck at YouTube. 1.00

00:36:14.000 You missed it again, you fuck. 1.00

00:36:16.000 Jesus Christ. 1.00

00:36:18.000 The guy goes hopping in front of it.

00:36:19.000 Here it goes.

00:36:21.000 Can you see it wiggling in the wind?

00:36:23.000 No, I missed it.

00:36:23.000 Can you do that?

00:36:24.000 You had stuff on the screen there. 1.00

00:36:25.000 Fucking ad popped up. 1.00

00:36:26.000 Mm-hmm. 1.00

00:36:30.000 See that?

00:36:31.000 Yeah, yeah, it looks like a breeze blew it.

00:36:32.000 Yeah, so do you think it's possible that that's fake?

00:36:35.000 Yeah, so either, either all of this got faked.

00:36:42.000 Or something touched the flag that was not obvious.

00:36:45.000 No, that's not true.

00:36:46.000 No, but that's my point.

00:36:47.000 But it's not either.

00:36:48.000 It's not either.

00:36:49.000 It could have easily been that some of the footage didn't come out well, or they faked some of the footage, or that was faked, or that might not have been even real Apollo footage.

00:36:57.000 No, no, no.

00:36:57.000 I mean, that might have been something that someone made and then put it up as a goof, and then everyone like me is saying that's Apollo footage.

00:37:04.000 So here's my point.

00:37:06.000 So there's a lot of fakery out there.

00:37:08.000 Official and otherwise.

00:37:10.000 Right.

00:37:11.000 And the most susceptible field of investigation to fakery is UFOlogy, right?

00:37:18.000 Okay.

00:37:18.000 Sure.

00:37:18.000 So, here's my point.

00:37:20.000 We're ghosts.

00:37:21.000 Okay.

00:37:22.000 You're looking at a picture that's relatively low quality, that doesn't see the entire zone around the flag.

00:37:28.000 You don't have full information.

00:37:31.000 So, someone goes by and the flag wiggles.

00:37:34.000 Either this was faked...

00:37:37.000 And there is air, and the flag is responding to air, or there's something, and the whole Apollo 15 mission didn't happen, if you want to take it to an extreme limit.

00:37:48.000 Or, there's something that didn't make it into this photo.

00:37:52.000 Right.

00:37:52.000 And that's all.

00:37:53.000 It's not...

00:37:54.000 It could have been like as he jumped maybe a piece of dust...

00:37:57.000 A piece of something.

00:37:58.000 ...kicked up and hit it.

00:38:00.000 Precisely.

00:38:00.000 And we don't see it because it's such low res.

00:38:02.000 Or his equipment touches it.

00:38:04.000 He looks like he's pretty close.

00:38:04.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:38:05.000 You don't have...

00:38:05.000 He's pretty far away from it.

00:38:06.000 No, no.

00:38:07.000 You have no depth cueing.

00:38:08.000 But look, the thing's in the ground right there.

00:38:10.000 Let's see the guy go by.

00:38:12.000 You do have depth if you watch the whole thing.

00:38:14.000 It's not good depth.

00:38:15.000 And he's got a backpack.

00:38:16.000 So I can't lose sleep over that.

00:38:20.000 Yeah, I just...

00:38:22.000 No, I'm definitely not losing sleep over it.

00:38:23.000 I just wanted you to look at a guy hopping in front of a flag, blowing in the breeze on an atmospherless moon.

00:38:30.000 I mean, these videos are one of the reasons why these conspiracies exist.

00:38:35.000 Yeah, and so I sympathize with some of that...

00:38:38.000 But it doesn't necessarily mean that no one...

00:38:41.000 I mean, if some piece of footage is fake, it doesn't mean the whole mission was fake.

00:38:46.000 Yeah, not only that, but I would say that it is so hard...

00:38:50.000 To fake every little thing that would need to happen.

00:38:53.000 It's easier to just go to the moon.

00:38:56.000 Really?

00:38:57.000 Why would it be so hard to make video footage and photographic footage and then release it?

00:39:04.000 I'll give you another reason why.

00:39:06.000 The sun, for all intents and purposes, in a photograph is at infinity.

00:39:10.000 Which means all shadows are parallel.

00:39:13.000 So if you photograph them in the correct way so that you don't have a foreshortening Of an angle, you'll see that shadows are parallel.

00:39:23.000 They reference one point at infinity.

00:39:27.000 You can't fake that.

00:39:28.000 In fact, that's how I know, in Hollywood, if they've artificially lit a scene and pretend that it's the sun.

00:39:34.000 Because they can't actually put their light source at infinity.

00:39:37.000 So I let it go because it's Hollywood and they've got to They pretend that it's daytime.

00:39:42.000 When they're filming at 3 o'clock in the morning when there's no traffic.

00:39:45.000 That's a hilarious statement, though.

00:39:46.000 I let it go.

00:39:47.000 I pretend.

00:39:48.000 I have to equate in my head. 0.98

00:39:49.000 The Suns of Infinity, they want to bullshit people. 0.96

00:39:52.000 Well, because they're trying. 0.97

00:39:53.000 But you want to talk about suspension of disbelief.

00:39:55.000 With me, I'm like, eh, maybe she really couldn't kill that dragon with a sword. 1.00

00:40:00.000 But fuck it, I'm at the movies. 1.00

00:40:02.000 With you, it's like... 1.00

00:40:04.000 No, I look for, you know, they can't control the sun.

00:40:08.000 So if they film one part of the scene in the morning, another part in the afternoon, the shadow is pointing in a different direction, and they want you to think it just happened ten minutes later.

00:40:15.000 They can't control the sun.

00:40:16.000 So they fake the sun in a sound studio, and they have the right color I let that go.

00:40:28.000 There's so much you'd have to fake. 0.99

00:40:30.000 I swear to you, it's easier to just go to the damn moon. 0.95

00:40:33.000 I understand exactly what you're saying, but it sounds crazy if you think that people actually couldn't get to the moon, then no. 0.98

00:40:40.000 If they actually physically couldn't survive out in the atmosphere of deep space, couldn't survive, what the talk is, the solar radiation, any solar flares, any solar activity would be instant death.

00:40:54.000 And this has sort of been kind of acknowledged by NASA that they rolled the dice with solar radiation.

00:40:59.000 So the people that are believing that it's impossible to get through the Van Allen radiation belts, for you to say to them that it would be just, it is false.

00:41:07.000 Yes.

00:41:08.000 However...

00:41:09.000 You don't spend much time getting through them.

00:41:10.000 So radiation dose is not simply is it there, it's how much time...

00:41:14.000 Exposure to it.

00:41:15.000 Yeah, it's time exposure to it.

00:41:17.000 Intensity plus time gives you total dose.

00:41:19.000 Right, but these people that believe that no humans have ever done it before, because the only people that did it were the Apollo astronauts, and no one's been able to do it since.

00:41:26.000 And every single space station flight, every space shuttle flight, all of them are within, what, 400 miles?

00:41:32.000 Easily.

00:41:32.000 Yeah, I mean, Space Station is two-something.

00:41:34.000 Hubble is a little higher, about 360 miles.

00:41:38.000 Right, but these are the only times where human beings have ever been past that, was the Apollos program.

00:41:44.000 So, for the conspiracy-minded, of course that comes up.

00:41:48.000 Well, no...

00:41:49.000 You can't survive in deep space.

00:41:50.000 No one's ever done it except some people in the 60s.

00:41:53.000 And no one believes that today.

00:41:54.000 And the reason why you can't get out there is because of solar flares and radiation and all this jazz.

00:41:59.000 So if they're right, then it would be easier to fake it.

00:42:03.000 You say they're not right because Van Allen says it's safe to go through the belts.

00:42:07.000 And then they went through the top, the donut hole.

00:42:09.000 But 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.

00:42:20.000 That freaks people out.

00:42:21.000 Because every single technological achievement from 1969 is easier, cheaper, and faster to reproduce today.

00:42:28.000 Well, no, no.

00:42:29.000 It had its own trajectory.

00:42:30.000 I mean, in 1969, the computer was still half the size of the room.

00:42:34.000 Same computer that's not even an iPhone, right?

00:42:38.000 Right, exactly.

00:42:38.000 Or the computing power that's in a singing birthday card.

00:42:43.000 So what Kubrick got wrong in 2001, in the midst of all the rest that was visionary, was the assumption that the future...

00:42:51.000 would be one big computer controlling the one big ship.

00:42:55.000 The notion of distributed computing where you would have the power of a mainframe sitting on your hip was unimagined at the time.

00:43:04.000 So yeah, things got systematically more powerful, but that's a natural progression of technology that's been going on since the Industrial Revolution.

00:43:13.000 That alone shouldn't surprise anybody.

00:43:16.000 No, that doesn't surprise anyone.

00:43:17.000 The argument is that the manned spaceflight is the only thing that hasn't advanced.

00:43:21.000 If you watch these movies From the 1970s.

00:43:24.000 They talked about 2010. My God, there's going to be space stations on the moon.

00:43:27.000 And there was Space 1999. Do you remember that show?

00:43:30.000 Yeah, of course.

00:43:31.000 Yeah.

00:43:31.000 God, I mean, but the reality is, our man's space exploration ended.

00:43:36.000 I'll tell you why.

00:43:37.000 Money.

00:43:38.000 Uh...

00:43:42.000 Yes, that's the clean, clear answer, but there's a more subtle answer.

00:43:46.000 When we went to the moon, everyone assumed, because of the way it was marketed, there was the profiles in Life magazine of each of the astronauts, and you saw their families, and the president said we should do it, and it was this grand mission from NASA,

00:44:03.000 a civilian space agency, and The World's Fair in New York, 1964, was all about inventing a future.

00:44:13.000 So we were living that romance.

00:44:16.000 All right.

00:44:18.000 What we were not reminding ourselves is that the only reason why we went to the moon is because we were at war with Russia, with the Soviet Union. 0.53

00:44:26.000 That is the only reason at all.

00:44:29.000 If 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, 0.62

00:44:47.000 you cry foul and you say, well, wait a minute, how about the future?

00:44:51.000 How about Mars?

00:44:52.000 And how about the rest of that?

00:44:53.000 Well, the rest of that was not ever in the plan unless Mars had planned to...

00:44:58.000 Russia had planned to do it.

00:45:00.000 And so it was not a natural flow of what our technology would have done because it didn't flow out of our economic creativity.

00:45:09.000 It came out of our urge to not die.

00:45:12.000 And so when you have that scenario, of course we didn't go past the moon after 1972. We were no longer competing with Russia to do that.

00:45:25.000 I 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,

00:45:41.000 whether it's building better bombs or faster planes.

00:45:44.000 Of course.

00:45:45.000 And it was all about military superiority.

00:45:47.000 Of course.

00:45:47.000 Wouldn't we be the first to set up a base on the moon?

00:45:49.000 Wouldn't we be the first to...

00:45:51.000 It's not necessary unless Russia does. 0.99

00:45:53.000 Right.

00:45:53.000 In fact, most of what we did in space was reactive to Russia.

00:45:57.000 We were not the first in space.

00:45:59.000 Russia was. 0.77

00:45:59.000 We weren't the first to send a life form into space. 0.77

00:46:02.000 Russia was. 0.77

00:46:02.000 Russia sent a dog. 0.77

00:46:04.000 We weren't the first humans in space.

00:46:07.000 Russians were. 0.80

00:46:08.000 Russians even put the first black person in space. 0.78

00:46:10.000 It was a Cuban cosmonaut.

00:46:14.000 The achievements in space, what we did, we got to the moon first.

00:46:18.000 And then we said, we win!

00:46:19.000 And so we have repainted that era in our memory as we are the pioneers and we did it because we explore.

00:46:29.000 No.

00:46:30.000 We did it because—that's a nice, after-the-fact window dressing you can put on that achievement, but we did it because we were at war.

00:46:37.000 There is no—once you understand that, it allows you to understand why we stopped.

00:46:43.000 I completely hear what you're saying, but you are fueling the conspiracy fires, and the people right now are thinking, Neil Tyson is working for the man.

00:46:52.000 This is what's going on.

00:46:53.000 He's come on this show to try to explain things in a very logical way.

00:46:58.000 Look at him with his tricky facts and logic.

00:47:01.000 Yeah, I'm muddying it with facts.

00:47:02.000 Information about history.

00:47:05.000 I agree with you, but I still see room. 0.98

00:47:08.000 I still see room for fuckery. 1.00

00:47:10.000 It means Mars is not in our future. 0.93

00:47:13.000 No, it doesn't.

00:47:13.000 Unless one of two conditions are satisfied.

00:47:17.000 Either China says they want to put military bases on Mars...

00:47:22.000 We're on Mars ten months after that.

00:47:24.000 One month to design, build, and launch a Mars-worthy craft, and nine months to get there.

00:47:32.000 That's if China says they want to put military bases on Mars, we're there tomorrow. 0.89

00:47:36.000 That's one way to get there.

00:47:38.000 Another way, we find some economic justification for doing it.

00:47:43.000 We're motivated by, I don't want to die.

00:47:46.000 And I don't want to die poor.

00:47:48.000 But aren't there massive resources just on the moon?

00:47:51.000 I mean, haven't they found titanium?

00:47:53.000 Entirely.

00:47:54.000 So that's a frontier.

00:47:55.000 What's the name of this new venture?

00:47:57.000 Terraforming?

00:47:58.000 No, Space Resources Incorporated.

00:48:00.000 I think that's their name.

00:48:01.000 I think I got it wrong.

00:48:02.000 But just do a Google on it.

00:48:04.000 You'll find it immediately.

00:48:05.000 This is a group of folks.

00:48:07.000 They'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.

00:48:23.000 And if you tow that thing to Earth, there you go.

00:48:27.000 The size of a football field?

00:48:28.000 Or less.

00:48:29.000 Less.

00:48:29.000 Size of a barn.

00:48:31.000 There are platinum group...

00:48:33.000 See, nature already did the sorting of the elements for us.

00:48:37.000 There was something called planetesimals.

00:48:41.000 Objects that didn't quite grow big enough to become planets.

00:48:44.000 And then they were susceptible to being shattered back into asteroids.

00:48:48.000 So, when you make a planet and it's still molten, the heavy stuff goes to the middle.

00:48:53.000 Right.

00:48:53.000 Because it sinks.

00:48:54.000 And the light stuff floats.

00:48:56.000 Well, what's heavy?

00:48:57.000 Iron is heavy.

00:48:58.000 Platinum is heavy.

00:48:58.000 Iridium is heavy.

00:49:00.000 Uranium is heavy.

00:49:01.000 All the heavy stuff is heavy.

00:49:03.000 So nature then sorts it.

00:49:05.000 The geologist calls it differentiation.

00:49:07.000 It sorts it.

00:49:07.000 Now you have this cosmic object that later on gets shattered.

00:49:11.000 You now have asteroids made of crust and asteroids made of core material.

00:49:16.000 And the core material has got all the elements and all those rare earth metals that we value in industry, that we value in jewelry.

00:49:26.000 It is pre-collected for us.

00:49:28.000 So if you get one of these platinum group asteroids, And bring it back to Earth?

00:49:33.000 There it is.

00:49:34.000 It's a whole new marketplace.

00:49:35.000 So you need like a Wonder Woman jet with a net. 1.00

00:49:38.000 Remember when she was the net shit? 0.99

00:49:40.000 Yeah, I remember that. 0.98

00:49:42.000 Or you corral the asteroid and use it for other operations in space, which is a much more financially...

00:49:49.000 A feasible thing to do with an asteroid.

00:49:52.000 So that would involve deep space travel?

00:49:54.000 Deep space.

00:49:55.000 Not only that.

00:49:55.000 Man, deep space travel, or robotic?

00:49:57.000 Wart bubbles.

00:49:58.000 You can do it.

00:49:59.000 Robots, sure.

00:50:00.000 If we can perfect robots, let the robot do it.

00:50:02.000 That's the best way to do it anyway, isn't it?

00:50:04.000 You don't have to feed them.

00:50:05.000 They don't want to come home after that.

00:50:07.000 Unless we flee this planet.

00:50:10.000 Unless we have to go all Battlestar Galactica, most likely we're not going to need to send people to explore things.

00:50:18.000 We have something like the rover.

00:50:20.000 Why take a chance on human biological life?

00:50:23.000 I want humans to go to Mars.

00:50:25.000 I think that's a good thing to do because you build heroes that way.

00:50:29.000 There's no ticker tape parades for robots.

00:50:31.000 No.

00:50:31.000 They'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.

00:50:39.000 We're going to find some real heroes.

00:50:41.000 We're going to see some real people that really weep the first time to get into a tent on Mars.

00:50:45.000 What you might do is just send couples, and then you get rid of that problem altogether. 1.00

00:50:48.000 Oh, then they fight.

00:50:49.000 You can't have that.

00:50:50.000 That's a terrible idea. 0.72

00:50:51.000 You can't have sex in space.

00:50:52.000 You send new couples. 0.94

00:50:53.000 No!

00:50:55.000 That's even worse.

00:50:56.000 You don't have any history together.

00:50:57.000 What are the odds that they're going to work out?

00:50:59.000 How many new couples stick around for nine months? 0.99

00:51:01.000 Yeah, that's a hard one.

00:51:02.000 They have found planets that are made entirely of diamonds.

00:51:06.000 Yeah, so diamond is pure carbon, if anyone didn't remember that.

00:51:10.000 A diamond comes in like...

00:51:11.000 Carbonated compression, right?

00:51:12.000 Yeah, five or six varieties.

00:51:14.000 And one of them is what's in your pencils, the graphite.

00:51:16.000 It's very soft and smooth.

00:51:19.000 That's a diamond?

00:51:19.000 No, no, no.

00:51:20.000 But it's carbon in a...

00:51:22.000 The lattice is layered...

00:51:25.000 In these smooth layers that slide off one another.

00:51:28.000 That'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.

00:51:39.000 Wow.

00:51:39.000 I never thought of it that way.

00:51:41.000 It's actually pretty cool.

00:51:42.000 It's very cool.

00:51:43.000 Yeah, it's almost sensual, right?

00:51:45.000 Yeah.

00:51:45.000 Layers of graphite.

00:51:46.000 Yeah, it's like a sculpture almost.

00:51:48.000 Lay to the page.

00:51:49.000 A 2D sculpture.

00:51:50.000 Obeying your every command, allowing you to communicate with other humans.

00:51:54.000 Yeah.

00:51:54.000 There is a pencil.

00:51:55.000 That's what's going on inside what we call the lead pencil.

00:51:58.000 Lead is just the term for what the graphite that's in a pencil has nothing to do with the element lead.

00:52:05.000 So other forms of carbon...

00:52:06.000 Lately we discovered the buckyball.

00:52:09.000 It's carbon 60. 60 carbon atoms that make a sheet that has curved into a sphere.

00:52:16.000 The shell of a sphere.

00:52:18.000 And it's essentially the lattice points of a soccer ball.

00:52:21.000 There's 60 of them, if you do it right.

00:52:24.000 And then you get what we call a buckyball.

00:52:26.000 Because a buckyball is named after Buckminster Fuller.

00:52:29.000 And he, you know, remember the geodesic dome?

00:52:33.000 Remember those?

00:52:33.000 Okay, so the lattice of this is The geodesic domes,

00:52:52.000 which Buckminster Fuller made popular, I guess, in the 1960s.

00:52:57.000 They predated him, by the way.

00:52:58.000 He's credited with inventing it, but he didn't.

00:53:00.000 It was invented by Zeiss, the planetary manufacturers in East Germany.

00:53:05.000 There were some engineers there.

00:53:06.000 They invented this.

00:53:07.000 This is an aside, but I think it's a pretty cool aside.

00:53:10.000 They invented a new way to project stars on the ceiling.

00:53:13.000 The first optical projector.

00:53:15.000 And they put it on their ceiling and say, you know, this would be cooler if the ceiling were round.

00:53:20.000 Do we have any round ceilings?

00:53:22.000 No.

00:53:23.000 Okay, well, here's a couple of dollars.

00:53:24.000 Go build one or invent one.

00:53:26.000 And they invented the geodesic dome just for the purpose of showing a dome where the stars would fit.

00:53:33.000 And this was in 1923. Wow.

00:53:35.000 Yeah, it was pretty cool.

00:53:36.000 That's amazing.

00:53:37.000 Carbon.

00:53:38.000 Carbon.

00:53:39.000 So you put the carbon atoms at the intersection points of a geodesic dome, and you basically get something that resembles the buckyball.

00:53:47.000 It's a new form of carbon.

00:53:48.000 It's one of the forms.

00:53:49.000 And one of them is diamond.

00:53:50.000 And diamond, the lattice is very tightly bound.

00:53:55.000 So no part of a diamond will slide off of any other part.

00:53:58.000 And diamond is the hardest natural substance known.

00:54:01.000 And that's why you have diamond drills.

00:54:03.000 You have diamond anvils.

00:54:06.000 And a diamond, because it's transparent and it's also very dense, Light actually slows down inside of a diamond.

00:54:14.000 It is only 40% as fast in a diamond as it is in the vacuum of space.

00:54:19.000 And because of that, it bends so severely in the cuts of the diamond that you can get double and triple reflections inside.

00:54:29.000 So light from one direction comes out in a different direction, making the diamond look like it's radiant on your finger.

00:54:38.000 It's pure carbon.

00:54:40.000 It is the same stuff that's in coal, except treated differently.

00:54:45.000 There was a man who, they wrote an article about him in Wired Magazine a few years back, where he had acquired some sort of technology from the Soviet Union where they had figured out how to make diamonds.

00:54:56.000 Oh, they're making them now.

00:54:58.000 I hosted Nova, Nova Science Now.

00:55:00.000 I don't anymore, but in my tenure as host...

00:55:04.000 We visited, they blindfolded me because they don't want De Beers to know about it, and took me to a secret factory, a manufacturing plant, where they're layering carbon onto a lattice in just the way a diamond They're just building diamonds.

00:55:21.000 They blindfolded you?

00:55:22.000 Oh yeah!

00:55:23.000 In fact, they took away my iPhone because my iPhone has the inertial memory of where it has been.

00:55:29.000 So that had to be turned off and I was blindfolded.

00:55:31.000 And then we did the interview in the factory and we looked inside the special patented devices.

00:55:40.000 They make it.

00:55:41.000 Now, here's what's the real weird thing about that.

00:55:44.000 Oh, 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. 0.98

00:55:56.000 This is how ridiculous chicks are. 1.00

00:55:58.000 This is what I'm going to get to. 0.99

00:55:59.000 My wife says she wouldn't want one of those diamonds. 0.98

00:56:03.000 Why?

00:56:03.000 Because they're artificial.

00:56:05.000 So I spoke to the merchants and I said, what are you going to do if there's a flood of these diamonds on the market?

00:56:13.000 They said, people are not going to want them.

00:56:16.000 He sounds like your wife.

00:56:17.000 Exactly.

00:56:18.000 Because 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.

00:56:26.000 And 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.

00:56:34.000 And so, for me, I'd take the artificial dynamite. 0.99

00:56:37.000 Fuck yeah! 1.00

00:56:38.000 And you know, some poor African kid doesn't have to chip it out of a, you know, rock with his hands. 1.00

00:56:43.000 Good point!

00:56:44.000 It's a very important point.

00:56:45.000 This is technology replacing human labor once again.

00:56:47.000 Well, isn't that a weird thing?

00:56:49.000 Does it freak you out when, I mean, obviously you're very technologically minded, but when you realize where these conflict minerals come from, and the actual stuff that's in your iPhone, someone might have dug it out of a hill in a poor community in Africa.

00:57:03.000 I mean, it's incredibly ironic.

00:57:05.000 Yeah, but it's not uniquely poor as a community that's exploited for some economic gain.

00:57:11.000 So my issue wouldn't be, oh, I'm concerned about these minerals.

00:57:16.000 I'm concerned about all the places where that's happening. 0.98

00:57:19.000 But it is ironic that the most technologically advanced shit we have needs To come that way. 0.95

00:57:29.000 That's where in 2012, until they started reform in these areas, that's where it was coming from. 0.98

00:57:34.000 That's how it was getting to us.

00:57:35.000 I wouldn't call a diamond technologically advanced.

00:57:38.000 When I think of technology, I think of machines.

00:57:40.000 No, I meant conflict minerals.

00:57:41.000 I meant conflict minerals that are in lithium-ion, things of that nature, or Coltrane in your cell phones.

00:57:46.000 Okay, right, right, right.

00:57:47.000 Yeah, so diamond...

00:57:50.000 So yes, getting back to what started this.

00:57:52.000 Blood diamonds.

00:57:53.000 Getting back to what started this.

00:57:55.000 Carbon is the...

00:58:00.000 Carbon is the fourth most common ingredient in the cosmos.

00:58:04.000 And the cosmos is full of places where there's high temperature and high pressure and a lot of time.

00:58:10.000 And we are delighted but not entirely surprised that there are places in the universe, even entire planets, where a large part of their composition would be pure diamond.

00:58:22.000 How long does it take to create a diamond in the earth inside?

00:58:26.000 I'm not up on the very...

00:58:28.000 Because pressure matters here as well.

00:58:30.000 And you can change one, and that affects what you need for the other.

00:58:35.000 And I don't have that map memorized in my head.

00:58:38.000 But it takes a long time, way longer than your lifetime.

00:58:41.000 So once you run out of diamonds in the earth, you're not getting any more diamonds.

00:58:46.000 You're going to have to make them yourself or find them elsewhere in the universe.

00:58:48.000 And how long does it take their machines to make them?

00:58:50.000 You can make one in about a week.

00:58:52.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:58:52.000 Oh yeah, you just lay it down. 0.71

00:58:53.000 You're done.

00:58:54.000 How big is it?

00:58:54.000 Like a quart?

00:58:55.000 It's hard to make a big one.

00:58:56.000 They make one, yeah, I'm not carrot fluent, but the size of a BB. So one that could easily fit in a post earring.

00:59:06.000 Oh, so that's it?

00:59:07.000 They can't get a big, fat, crazy, Jay-Z-type rock?

00:59:10.000 It's harder.

00:59:11.000 An Elizabeth Taylor side?

00:59:12.000 No, no, they're not there yet.

00:59:13.000 No, no.

00:59:14.000 Kim Kardashian-type rock.

00:59:15.000 Those are rare anyway.

00:59:16.000 Those are extremely rare anyway.

00:59:17.000 And the most common diamonds are small.

00:59:19.000 Yeah, they can certainly compete in that marketplace.

00:59:21.000 Doesn't De Beers have like the rumor is, the conspiracy theory is, we should play that.

00:59:27.000 Keeping the theme going throughout the podcast.

00:59:30.000 The theory is that there's a warehouse that they keep.

00:59:34.000 There's so many diamonds that they artificially inflate the price by slowly releasing them to the marketplace.

00:59:41.000 Is that true?

00:59:42.000 Yeah, I think there's not a pure market.

00:59:44.000 I 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.

01:00:00.000 And it presupposes that there's full access to supplies and demand And nothing is being withheld.

01:00:08.000 So, yes, De Beers is withholding, if not De Beers, someone else, is withholding diamonds from the marketplace to assure a certain price.

01:00:16.000 If they flooded the market, the price would drop. 1.00

01:00:18.000 Goddammit, Mrs. Rogan, you listening to this shit? 1.00

01:00:21.000 You don't need a real diamond. 1.00

01:00:23.000 Well, here's the scary part. 0.98

01:00:24.000 It's ridiculous.

01:00:25.000 Here we are killing each other over resources buried in the ground and in the sands, including sources of energy.

01:00:34.000 Chemical energy in that case, whereas the universe has an unlimited supply of everything, including energy.

01:00:41.000 So why isn't that reflected in the budget that we put into space travel? 0.71

01:00:45.000 It seems ridiculous and short-sighted. 0.99

01:00:47.000 It seems like you could take all this military-industrial money and say, listen, you fuckers want to get really rich? 1.00

01:00:52.000 Let's get crazy. 1.00

01:00:53.000 Let's go space cowboy style and go lasso some rocks.

01:00:56.000 The space resources company is doing exactly that.

01:00:59.000 What is the space resources company?

01:01:01.000 They're targeting asteroids for How does that work?

01:01:06.000 Is space...

01:01:07.000 is eventually going to be like the homesteaders back in the 1800s where you would move there and get a plot of land?

01:01:13.000 Are you going to be able to claim plots of space?

01:01:15.000 Currently, space law, which is an interesting frontier at the UN and in other places, space law has certain rules and regulations.

01:01:24.000 One of them I think is unrealistic and it has to do with the waging of war, and I'll get to that in a minute.

01:01:28.000 War with aliens?

01:01:30.000 Space war?

01:01:32.000 No, it forbids warfare.

01:01:36.000 It forbids space from serving as a platform for war.

01:01:40.000 But I think that's completely naive and unrealistic, and I'll tell you why in a minute.

01:01:46.000 And people say, oh, space should be a peaceful place.

01:01:48.000 I think that is naïve. 1.00

01:01:50.000 That's naïve bordering on stupid. 1.00

01:01:52.000 They obviously haven't seen Battlestar Galactica. 1.00

01:01:55.000 Yeah.

01:01:57.000 So, in space, so the way the laws, the books now read, it could change with emerging consensus.

01:02:05.000 The way it now reads is, you cannot own anything off the earth.

01:02:11.000 However, no one can stop you from putting a flag on it, and no one can stop you from mining resources from it.

01:02:20.000 You just can't claim to own it and require that someone else pay you to use it.

01:02:27.000 So, in other words, there's no private objects in space.

01:02:33.000 But if you do acquire an object and you bring it back, can you use it for profit?

01:02:37.000 That hasn't been fully explored legally yet.

01:02:39.000 Yeah, if you invested all the money, I think the laws are going to go in the favor of free market capitalism.

01:02:45.000 And this is why conspiracy theories will step in and say, that's why Obama's moving towards socialism.

01:02:51.000 They're trying to control all the resources in space.

01:02:54.000 They want to pull in all those minerals and diamonds and ruin the Jews in their marketplace stranglehold on the diamond industry. 1.00

01:03:02.000 Except the rate at which Obama's plan to return to space is not commensurate with that as a...

01:03:09.000 A viable conspiracy plan.

01:03:11.000 Unless you take into account the conspiracy theory to keep the elites alive forever and start killing off people with eugenics and wars. 0.86

01:03:21.000 There's a lot of people that that's another very fine conspiracy theory.

01:03:25.000 Crop circles and chemtrails.

01:03:27.000 I don't know if you're familiar with either one of those.

01:03:29.000 I don't know about chemtrails, but certainly crop circles.

01:03:31.000 Everybody knows about crop circles.

01:03:33.000 I mean, come on.

01:03:33.000 You don't know about chemtrails?

01:03:34.000 No, what are chemtrails?

01:03:35.000 I need to introduce you to Eddie Bravo.

01:03:36.000 No.

01:03:37.000 What chemtrails are is one of the easily the silliest conspiracy theories.

01:03:45.000 There's something, there's validity to it, unfortunately.

01:03:48.000 First of all, cloud seeding has been done in many cultures.

01:03:52.000 It's done on a regular open basis in the United Arab Emirates.

01:03:56.000 In Abu Dhabi, they made it rain 50 times last year.

01:03:58.000 They're doing it every week.

01:03:59.000 You can do it.

01:04:00.000 We know that scientifically. 1.00

01:04:02.000 But what they're claiming is that the government is spraying shit. 0.99

01:04:07.000 Out of planes. 0.99

01:04:08.000 And these are not regular planes.

01:04:09.000 And those contrails that last forever, those are actually chemtrails.

01:04:14.000 Those are fake clouds and there's all sorts of different things that are spraying that control the populace through spraying.

01:04:21.000 In what way is it controlling us?

01:04:24.000 You're asking for too many facts.

01:04:26.000 You've already gone too far with this.

01:04:28.000 I had to talk to a pilot.

01:04:30.000 I said, okay, this is driving me crazy.

01:04:32.000 When we were kids, man, those clouds in the sky, when a plane would fly over, they would dissipate really quickly, but now they stay forever. 1.00

01:04:39.000 They're fucking spraying us with shit, man. 1.00

01:04:41.000 This is how crazy people are. 1.00

01:04:42.000 So then I talked to a pilot and I said, okay, how come sometimes the clouds go away and sometimes they don't?

01:04:48.000 The persistence of contrails.

01:04:49.000 It says it's the amount of how much water is in the atmosphere, which varies.

01:04:53.000 And I go, thank you.

01:04:55.000 That's all I need to know.

01:04:55.000 So when the jet engine flies through, it makes an artificial cloud.

01:04:59.000 It really does.

01:04:59.000 It spirals up the water and the wind, and in its wake, it leaves this temporary cloud.

01:05:04.000 And it has to cool in order for it to condense.

01:05:08.000 And if you look immediately outside of the engine, there's an interval where it is not clouded.

01:05:13.000 It's completely transparent.

01:05:14.000 And then it cools, reaching the temperature of the surrounding air, and then it condenses out.

01:05:19.000 But the levels of moisture are different at different altitudes.

01:05:22.000 So a plane will...

01:05:23.000 Not leave the same contrail at all altitudes from near an airport up to 41,000 feet.

01:05:28.000 Exactly.

01:05:29.000 Just as like some areas it rains and some areas are desert.

01:05:32.000 There's areas of...

01:05:33.000 It should be it.

01:05:36.000 But people get really wacky with that one.

01:05:39.000 That's a weird one.

01:05:40.000 And it's another one where there's very little looking into the possible answers.

01:05:44.000 It's like they want it to be sprayed.

01:05:46.000 Yeah, you want it to be.

01:05:47.000 They want it to be cancer-causing things that the government is spraying on us in order to lower the population numbers because there's too many of us.

01:05:54.000 That's why there's lithium in the water supply, Neil Tyson.

01:05:57.000 I had a conversation with someone who said, do you know there's antidepressants in the water supply?

01:06:01.000 I go, well, that's because people flush their antidepressants and they pee.

01:06:06.000 I go, but the amount is so tiny.

01:06:09.000 I go, this is nothing that you could ever...

01:06:11.000 It's not psychoactive amounts.

01:06:13.000 He's like, how do you know that, man?

01:06:14.000 How do you know that?

01:06:14.000 I'm like, okay.

01:06:15.000 I don't know.

01:06:15.000 How do you know, man?

01:06:16.000 Go get some water and bring it to a fucking testing facility. 1.00

01:06:20.000 Yeah, test it. 1.00

01:06:20.000 You can test this stuff. 1.00

01:06:21.000 Stop freaking me out. 1.00

01:06:22.000 There's enough real shit to freak me out. 1.00

01:06:24.000 What drives me nuts is like end-of-the-world people. 0.99

01:06:28.000 I would have conversations with them, and they were convinced, this Mayan thing, and society's all headed towards a certain thing.

01:06:34.000 It's really obvious.

01:06:36.000 And I'm like, do you ever pay attention to super volcanoes?

01:06:39.000 Yeah, the real issues to be contended with here. 0.99

01:06:41.000 There's some real shit going on in Yellowstone. 0.96

01:06:44.000 Like, Yellowstone, every six to eight hundred thousand years, essentially kills half the continent off. 0.99

01:06:50.000 Do you know that when we were growing up, Old Faithful was called Old Faithful, and it was faithful to the clock?

01:06:57.000 And then there was some geologic stuff that happened, and now it'll still blow, but it's not regular anymore.

01:07:04.000 I saw this National Geographic piece.

01:07:06.000 I don't know if they mean it.

01:07:07.000 Yeah, sometimes faithful, you know.

01:07:09.000 Well, he held it together for a long time.

01:07:13.000 Yeah, you gotta get some credit.

01:07:14.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:07:16.000 There was a National Geographic piece on Yellowstone where it was right when they sort of figured out that Yellowstone was a caldera volcano.

01:07:23.000 They figured out how large it was.

01:07:24.000 And they were talking about the frequency of earthquakes.

01:07:28.000 And it was over like a six-month period or something like that?

01:07:32.000 There was 2,000 earthquakes in Yellowstone.

01:07:35.000 Oh yeah, well it depends on what your threshold is for measuring an earthquake.

01:07:38.000 Most earthquakes in the world If they happen right under your feet, you wouldn't notice it.

01:07:43.000 And so, because their energy level is so low that they don't even get past the absorbers in your knees.

01:07:51.000 You got new knees or new hips? 0.95

01:07:52.000 What did you get?

01:07:52.000 Well, ligaments.

01:07:54.000 Oh, new ligaments, yeah.

01:07:55.000 The knees are...

01:07:55.000 Yeah, almost no matter the condition of your knees, you wouldn't feel an earthquake up to two or three.

01:08:01.000 And in New York City, with the subway rumbling underfoot where I live, That's like 4.5 on the Richter scale.

01:08:08.000 Is it really?

01:08:09.000 Yeah, it's something...

01:08:10.000 In fact, when the World Trade Center collapsed, that triggered...

01:08:13.000 I was four blocks away when it happened.

01:08:16.000 That triggered...

01:08:17.000 I paid very close attention to everything that was happening, including what kind of vibration in the ground it caused.

01:08:23.000 And it was about the A train going 30 miles an hour.

01:08:27.000 Just below your feet.

01:08:28.000 So when the train goes, you feel it.

01:08:29.000 Oh, yeah.

01:08:30.000 And you ignore it because it's the normal vibrations of life.

01:08:33.000 So that's like a four.

01:08:35.000 Yeah, it's three and four.

01:08:37.000 So you look at the earthquake counting.

01:08:40.000 There are tons of these.

01:08:41.000 And so they don't really matter until it can structurally hurt something.

01:08:46.000 And then you talk about it.

01:08:48.000 It becomes a news item.

01:08:49.000 So the count of earthquakes is not interesting.

01:08:51.000 You want the number of earthquakes above seven, above six and a half, above...

01:08:56.000 Five, they start getting interesting, but not lethal yet.

01:09:02.000 Set your threshold, then give me the number.

01:09:05.000 So are those earthquakes, those small ones, like the Yellowstone ones, are they going on everywhere?

01:09:09.000 It's just they're measuring it in Yellowstone?

01:09:11.000 Some places are more geologically active than others.

01:09:15.000 Places that are geologically active, where you get the occasional 7, 8, 9, or 7 and 8 on the Richter scale, or whatever the scale is called today, Those places, you're getting these low ones practically all the time.

01:09:26.000 Yeah, all the time.

01:09:27.000 Okay, so freaking out about Yellowstone having 2,000 earthquakes, like really you should freak out about 2,007s.

01:09:33.000 Yeah, that's exactly right.

01:09:35.000 And this is another one of these things where it's partial information scaled up into a catastrophe scenario that feeds people's fears and the kind of fear that people delight in.

01:09:49.000 Mm-hmm.

01:09:50.000 People say, oh, you know, Manhattan has a fault line running right down the middle.

01:09:54.000 Manhattan, where three million people live and work.

01:09:57.000 And yeah, it does.

01:09:59.000 And it's been dead for a million years.

01:10:03.000 That's a geologically dead fault, okay?

01:10:06.000 So it hasn't moved in a million years?

01:10:07.000 No, I don't know the number, but it's dead.

01:10:09.000 I mean, it's nothing happening there.

01:10:10.000 We've got, you know, play swings on it.

01:10:14.000 And part of it is what created Harlem Heights, which overlooks Harlem.

01:10:18.000 In fact, when Columbia moved in, they renamed it.

01:10:22.000 They call it Morningside Heights, but it's actually Harlem Heights.

01:10:26.000 That's a raised part of Manhattan.

01:10:28.000 It's well above the lower areas where the rest of Harlem is.

01:10:32.000 It's cool.

01:10:33.000 So Manhattan has some remnant geologic features.

01:10:36.000 Not all of it has been bulldozed over to put skyscrapers.

01:10:40.000 That's fascinating.

01:10:40.000 I didn't know that it was actually above it because of a fault.

01:10:44.000 Yeah, it's a fault line.

01:10:45.000 A fascinating fault line.

01:10:46.000 Some of that was retained in Central Park.

01:10:48.000 They left some geologically interesting features there.

01:10:51.000 But the point is, they're Earthquakes down to level two, what were measurable, they happen all the time in most places.

01:11:00.000 And they happen often in most places and practically continuously where you are geologically active.

01:11:07.000 And for folks who don't know what we were talking about earlier when we said a caldera volcano, essentially what it is is a volcano that when it blows, it leaves almost like a crater.

01:11:15.000 It leaves like a gigantic, I think it's 300 kilometers wide or something.

01:11:19.000 In a supervolcano, you basically repave major...

01:11:23.000 You know, Venus has very few craters on it.

01:11:27.000 And given its age and the fact that there is no rain or weather systems that could erode them, you can ask, well, what's going on there?

01:11:39.000 And further analysis shows that Venus completely repaves its surface at regular intervals.

01:11:49.000 Yeah.

01:12:08.000 Spot on the moon.

01:12:09.000 It's a place on the moon.

01:12:10.000 It's called a sea because back before we knew anything about the moon, it was a large, dark area, flat, dark area of the moon.

01:12:19.000 And we imagine that maybe there's water there.

01:12:22.000 And if there's water there, there are regions called seas.

01:12:26.000 You know what these actually are?

01:12:28.000 They're volcanic basins.

01:12:29.000 When the moon was geologically active, lava spilled out, spread all over the surface of the moon as far as it could reach, and these became what today we call seas.

01:12:40.000 And you know the seas happen very late because they have fewer craters than adjacent areas.

01:12:47.000 Where the lava did not spill in.

01:12:49.000 So you could date the surface of the moon based on how many craters there are within a given area.

01:12:55.000 Do you ever feel like, I mean, since your fascination is space...

01:13:00.000 Wait, wait, wait, to finish that.

01:13:01.000 So on Venus...

01:13:03.000 Where there are very few craters, when we know there should be many, that tells us that the entire surface suffers from freshened volcanic flow, unlike the Moon, where the last time it laid out these seas is billions of years ago.

01:13:17.000 So Venus is just constant supervolcanoes all the time.

01:13:20.000 When 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.

01:13:34.000 Because...

01:13:36.000 We aren't seeing these big impacts on a regular basis.

01:13:39.000 And in fact, we've only recorded a few of them.

01:13:41.000 The recent one in Jupiter, this massive one, which was by...

01:13:45.000 Yeah, which was an amateur astronomer, right?

01:13:47.000 Yeah.

01:13:47.000 Caught it.

01:13:48.000 And the one that...

01:13:50.000 There was a flash of light on Jupiter just by accident caught.

01:13:52.000 Yeah.

01:13:52.000 And then there was the other one, the one that was observed.

01:13:55.000 Was it 94?

01:13:56.000 Yeah, the big one.

01:13:57.000 Yeah.

01:13:57.000 When was that?

01:13:58.000 Yeah.

01:13:58.000 So that one was Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. Yeah.

01:14:01.000 Yeah.

01:14:01.000 And that one, it was a comet that...

01:14:03.000 The tidal forces of Jupiter on a previous pass had broken that solid comet up into two dozen smaller but still significant chunks of comet material.

01:14:15.000 And it had a trajectory that was headed straight for Jupiter.

01:14:18.000 And we were ready for it.

01:14:20.000 And the Hubble telescope was in place and everybody was aiming.

01:14:24.000 And each one of these blobs of comet that fell into Jupiter...

01:14:29.000 Plunged into the atmosphere and exploded with more energy than all the bombs in the American arsenal.

01:14:36.000 And so a better way to say that is it plunged with more energy than the impact that rendered the dinosaurs extinct on Earth.

01:14:47.000 And so to get a sense of the energetics of the solar system is extraordinary.

01:14:52.000 So the solar system, to get to your point, is a shooting gallery.

01:14:55.000 And the moon, which is sitting right in front of our nose, it's our nearest neighbor that, writ large, is the evidence of what Earth plows through daily.

01:15:06.000 And we are protected by our atmosphere from most of it.

01:15:10.000 And my other point was that when you see that, you see all the impacts.

01:15:15.000 There's so many impacts.

01:15:17.000 When you try to wrap your head around how many years a million years is, how many years a billion years is...

01:15:23.000 It's one of the hardest things.

01:15:26.000 Our brains are wired for understanding whether we'll be eaten by a tiger or a lion, or whether...

01:15:35.000 Space and time...

01:15:38.000 Our minds interact with it in very terrestrial ways.

01:15:43.000 With the advent of the telescope and our understandings of the laws of physics, we've had to come to an understanding of the depth of time and the expanse of space that completely transcends what it is natural for us to contemplate.

01:16:00.000 And so you have to almost grow accustomed to these facts rather than take them into your heart because they fall so far beyond anything we've been trained to think about.

01:16:10.000 And that's why it's so hard for anyone to believe that you can go from a microorganism to a giraffe or a human being over the billions of years of the cycle of life.

01:16:19.000 Wait, do you believe in evolution?

01:16:20.000 Is that what you're trying to say?

01:16:21.000 It's not a matter of belief.

01:16:24.000 It's what the evidence shows, and when I'm given the choice, I'm going with the evidence. 0.89

01:16:28.000 Listen, that's silly. 0.98

01:16:30.000 That's a ridiculous way to live. 0.98

01:16:35.000 So the depth of time is extraordinary. 0.94

01:16:37.000 The depth of time, just like a piece of rock like the moon, where you see all those impacts, you think, how long is that?

01:16:44.000 What am I looking at?

01:16:45.000 How much time did it take for all those rocks to fly out of space and hit that?

01:16:50.000 And as a temporary organism, you being a human being who has this sort of terrestrial fascination, It's got to be almost like a mad race to collect information in an infinitely impossible universe.

01:17:06.000 We are like mayflies in the cosmos.

01:17:08.000 Yeah.

01:17:09.000 Not even that.

01:17:10.000 Think about it.

01:17:10.000 Not even that.

01:17:12.000 That's right.

01:17:13.000 What does a mayfly know of a change of seasons or a change of years? 1.00

01:17:18.000 These are unfathomably long timescales to the life cycle of a mayfly.

01:17:24.000 Generations.

01:17:25.000 Calendar months.

01:17:26.000 And so here we are.

01:17:27.000 Were 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.

01:17:42.000 So an interesting analogy to this, I think, is when you look up at a puffy cloud, to you it's just a cloud sitting there and it has a shape.

01:17:55.000 But we've all seen time lapse of clouds, particularly rain clouds.

01:17:59.000 That's a turbulent place!

01:18:03.000 The bubbles of cloud, particularly the cumulonimbus, they're just gurgling up.

01:18:07.000 They're boiling up through the center, and it keeps regenerating, and rain is coming out the bottom.

01:18:13.000 And that doesn't take much of a time-lapsed video to capture.

01:18:18.000 10 minutes?

01:18:19.000 15 minutes?

01:18:21.000 But that's not our understanding of clouds.

01:18:23.000 Our understanding is that there are just these things peacefully floating there.

01:18:28.000 And that's just human perception versus a 15-minute time-lapse video.

01:18:33.000 Imagine human perception versus the billions of years of cosmic evolution.

01:18:38.000 Then it really is a shooting gallery.

01:18:40.000 We don't stand a chance.

01:18:42.000 When you see the potential hazards and catastrophes of space and you think about...

01:18:54.000 The temporary lifespan of the human being.

01:18:57.000 Does it frustrate you at all? 0.99

01:18:59.000 Does it seem like, God, I'm going to miss a lot of shit? 0.99

01:19:02.000 Well, there's several consequences. 0.99

01:19:04.000 One of them is we don't know how to understand those dangers.

01:19:09.000 If I say a killer asteroid is going to come every 100 million years, you'll say, oh, don't worry about it.

01:19:15.000 But when it comes, it'll render you extinct.

01:19:18.000 And we don't know when it's going to come between now and 100 million years from now.

01:19:22.000 Do you even have the...

01:19:23.000 The temerity to say, well, I'd better build a protection plan on the possibility that it comes in my lifetime or in the lifetime of all my loved generations that follow.

01:19:35.000 We don't know how to react.

01:19:38.000 We're not wired for that thought.

01:19:39.000 Let me tell you how badly we're not wired for that thought.

01:19:43.000 What happens after a hurricane devastates a coastline?

01:19:46.000 We rebuild.

01:19:48.000 Oh, it's not going to happen to me.

01:19:49.000 This is stuff within your lifetime.

01:19:51.000 Right.

01:19:52.000 This is the 20-year hurricane, the 30-year hurricane, not the 200-year, 500,000-year hurricane.

01:19:59.000 So, unfortunately, our brains aren't wired for this.

01:20:03.000 So it's a good thing that we have methods and tools that can compensate for this shortcoming.

01:20:09.000 Do we have any sort of scientific plan to handle asteroid impacts?

01:20:14.000 On paper?

01:20:15.000 Oh yeah, we've got a total solution worked out on paper, completely unfunded at the moment.

01:20:19.000 When you say on paper, is it for like...

01:20:21.000 You can do the engineering.

01:20:22.000 You can do the engineering and it'll work.

01:20:26.000 The physics and engineering.

01:20:27.000 What do they do?

01:20:27.000 They knock it out of orbit or something?

01:20:29.000 No, if you're macho.

01:20:30.000 If you're... 0.99

01:20:31.000 You blow the sucker out of the sky. 0.94

01:20:34.000 Is there a Sylvester Stallone approach and then there's like a Stephen Hawking approach? 0.89

01:20:37.000 I forgot I'm speaking to an MMA guy here, right?

01:20:41.000 Jiu-jitsu.

01:20:42.000 So there are different solutions.

01:20:44.000 The problem is, yeah, we could conceivably blow the thing up, but as Americans, we're really good at blowing stuff up, and we're less good at knowing where the pieces land afterwards.

01:20:55.000 So I don't want to blow this thing into six pieces and still have all those six pieces headed towards Earth.

01:21:01.000 So the kinder, gentler solution is to deflect it from harm's way.

01:21:06.000 And there's something called a gravitational tractor beam, essentially.

01:21:10.000 I mean, that's the poetic way to say it, the sci-fi way to say it.

01:21:13.000 But really, you put a space pod out there that has a gravitational field that attracts, slowly, attracts the asteroid into a slightly different orbit.

01:21:24.000 And if you get there early enough, you don't have to deflect it by much because that deflection accumulates.

01:21:29.000 And all you need it to do is miss Earth.

01:21:32.000 Now, it's still out there to harm you another day, but if you get good at this, you just have, you know, just like you have the block protection, nighttime protection force, you know, in the neighborhood, well, you'd have the asteroid protection force, and that would be protecting Earth from asteroids.

01:21:47.000 And Jupiter protects us from most asteroids, right?

01:21:50.000 Well, for most of the things that...

01:21:55.000 Most asteroids are within the orbit of Jupiter, so Jupiter doesn't need to protect us from them.

01:22:01.000 Well, we would want it to, it just doesn't.

01:22:04.000 Because their orbits don't reach Jupiter for enough Jupiter to bat it into a new place.

01:22:09.000 Comets that come from far beyond the orbit of Jupiter, when they come near Jupiter, they feel Jupiter's titanic gravitational field.

01:22:19.000 And Jupiter basically bends them into a new orbit.

01:22:22.000 And so many of them don't even make it past Earth's orbit on its way towards the Sun.

01:22:27.000 So these new orbits clears the space for our survival here on Earth.

01:22:32.000 And so Jupiter is our friend.

01:22:34.000 It's our It's our friend that takes care of the bullies in the schoolyard.

01:22:37.000 Do we know enough about other solar systems to know whether or not this is a typical setup?

01:22:43.000 It was our urge, given what's called the Copernican principle, to say that we're not special, we're average.

01:22:50.000 And if we're average, then other solar systems should look like us.

01:22:54.000 Because the sun is kind of average, and we're not on the littlest planet or the biggest planet.

01:23:01.000 So you make some assumptions.

01:23:05.000 As the star systems came into the catalogs, as our techniques and methods to observe other planets in the solar system arose, we started to learn that our solar system is not typical.

01:23:17.000 That most solar systems, most star systems, have a Jupiter-sized object much closer to their host star than our Jupiter is.

01:23:25.000 So then we say, well, why is our star system different from theirs?

01:23:29.000 And so it's a frontier.

01:23:31.000 It's an active frontier, and no one is putting their bets on any one kind of solar system as being the most representative.

01:23:37.000 And we're building the catalog now.

01:23:39.000 So the catalog that has 700 or so exoplanets in it?

01:23:45.000 That's only 500 star systems.

01:23:49.000 We're now building the catalogs of the secondary tertiary planets in the star systems that we've already discovered.

01:23:55.000 We've discovered a lot of binary star systems as well, right?

01:23:58.000 Where there's more than one sun?

01:24:00.000 Oh, well, first, if you look up at the night sky, almost half of all the dots of light you see, if you pull out a telescope, will reveal themselves to be binary or triple star systems.

01:24:10.000 It is as common as the breeze.

01:24:13.000 In the universe.

01:24:14.000 The challenge here is, what happens to a planet in orbit around a binary or multiple star system?

01:24:20.000 That's the challenge.

01:24:21.000 And is the atmosphere stable enough to support life?

01:24:24.000 That would be a concern no matter where the planet is.

01:24:27.000 But here's the challenge with a multi-star star system.

01:24:31.000 As the planet orbits, maybe it'll get really close to one star and really far from another, and maybe the orbit is entangled between the two of them, trying to do figure eights.

01:24:44.000 If you have an unstable orbit, You're likely to eject the planet forever into interstellar space.

01:24:53.000 And in fact, data are now showing that interstellar space may have more rogue planets that have been ejected For having misbehaved orbits from their star systems than there are stars within planetary systems themselves. 0.99

01:25:07.000 Dude, you just blew my fucking mind. 0.96

01:25:09.000 And they're called rogue planets. 0.99

01:25:10.000 No, no, let me...

01:25:11.000 No, no, I'm just beginning here.

01:25:13.000 So watch.

01:25:14.000 So, we also know that many planets have still retained their heat of formation long after...

01:25:21.000 They've come into existence.

01:25:23.000 Earth still has heat churning, a source of energy that is not traceable to the sun.

01:25:28.000 This is what creates the magma that's sitting below Earth's crust.

01:25:32.000 The sun didn't heat that.

01:25:34.000 That's heat generated within the Earth.

01:25:36.000 Some is left over from formation.

01:25:37.000 Others is created from radioactive decay of elements.

01:25:41.000 But we've got an energy source.

01:25:44.000 And our biology books from decades ago said life needs sunlight.

01:25:48.000 No, no, no, no.

01:25:50.000 Life needs energy.

01:25:51.000 It doesn't care if it comes from the sun.

01:25:54.000 Volcanic vents at the bottom of the sea with no sunlight.

01:25:57.000 For example, the Juan de Fuca ridge off of the coast of Washington is a vent in the bottom of the ocean that is releasing the heat from below.

01:26:10.000 And it's an energy source.

01:26:12.000 It's at the bottom of the ocean where the sun don't shine, where the sun don't reach.

01:26:17.000 And yet there's life form thriving there, existing on a form of geochemical energy.

01:26:23.000 It's got nothing to do with the sun.

01:26:25.000 The fact that we've discovered exotic life on Earth has broadened the net.

01:26:31.000 that we have cast into space in our search for life in the universe.

01:26:36.000 No longer do we need to look for the 72 degree pond in an oxygen atmosphere planet in our search for life.

01:26:44.000 So this Goldilocks zone where everything had to be perfect, we've got life thriving in places that would kill us.

01:26:51.000 And we are not the measure, the ultimate measure, of what the conditions that life requires to survive.

01:26:59.000 So now that we're looking with this very broad net, we can say to ourselves, for these vagabond planets, if they still have their source of energy churning within, Maybe there's life there.

01:27:11.000 And if that's the case, the galaxy could be teeming with life, and the fact that we're focusing our search on planets around stars may simply be limiting all that we can discover in the cosmos.

01:27:25.000 So these planets could essentially be spaceships filled with life forms headed our way, and they might even slam into us.

01:27:34.000 Well, metaphorical spaceships, yeah.

01:27:35.000 And the problem is, since they're homeless, there's nothing to illuminate them.

01:27:41.000 So they're pitch black, flying through the galaxy.

01:27:44.000 If some of the heat reaches the surface, you can use infrared telescopes that might pick them up.

01:27:50.000 But we wouldn't even know where to look.

01:27:54.000 Well, isn't that the thought about the object that they believe is somewhere outside of the Kuiper Belt?

01:28:01.000 Is that how they say it?

01:28:02.000 Yeah, Kuiper. 0.95

01:28:03.000 So this is an astronomer mid-20th century who hypothesized...

01:28:08.000 That 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. 0.55

01:28:18.000 But the residue should still be out there.

01:28:20.000 Because if you're residue in an orbit where a red-blooded planet exists, you're going to collide with that planet eventually. 1.00

01:28:26.000 You're going to merge with the planet and make that planet even bigger.

01:28:30.000 This is one of the failed criteria for Pluto.

01:28:35.000 Being classified as a planet because it is in a zone in the solar system that has not cleared its orbit.

01:28:40.000 It is in the Kuiper belt, in the inner edge of it, yes, but it is joined by countless thousands of other icy bodies. 0.75

01:28:51.000 Earth, 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.

01:29:04.000 It doesn't knock over the elephant. 0.71

01:29:06.000 It is of no concern to the elephant.

01:29:08.000 Anything that could still possibly collide with us, Earth won't even care. 0.91

01:29:13.000 We'll care because it'll affect the ecosystem, but Earth, the planet, is so much more massive than anything we would ever collide with from now to the end of the solar system.

01:29:22.000 We have basically cleared our orbit of anything dangerous.

01:29:25.000 Pluto has not.

01:29:26.000 So that was a damning fact in the ruling that got it demoted from planet to planet.

01:29:31.000 So meaning that it doesn't have enough mass to attract all the other objects that are nearby?

01:29:36.000 And neither does anything else.

01:29:37.000 And so it's just the swarm of comets, the Kuiper Belt of comets.

01:29:40.000 So now, if you go beyond the Kuiper Belt, you're so far from the Sun...

01:29:44.000 If you're going to talk to us, it would be through reflected sunlight, but you're so far away...

01:29:49.000 Nothing reflects.

01:29:50.000 Yeah, and these things are really dark objects to begin with.

01:29:54.000 So how do they find them?

01:29:55.000 Well, it'd be hard.

01:29:56.000 So it's possible you can have a big object well beyond the Kuiper Belt.

01:30:00.000 It would just be really hard to find.

01:30:02.000 And I can say without...

01:30:06.000 Hesitation.

01:30:07.000 That if there's a huge object out there, its gravity is of no consequence to anything that's going on between us and the Kuiper Belt.

01:30:14.000 I just thought it was fascinating because the idea was that there was a Jupiter-sized planet so far outside of our solar system, or what we consider our solar system, that it was causing some sort of a gravitational effect on the Kuiper Belt.

01:30:26.000 What you might be remembering is the Nemesis object.

01:30:32.000 What is that?

01:30:33.000 Okay.

01:30:35.000 Now I'm feeding your...

01:30:37.000 My doom and gloom?

01:30:39.000 Don't do it.

01:30:40.000 Let the record show the man's eyebrows moved up into his forehead.

01:30:46.000 So there was an analysis of the extinction episodes in the history of the Earth that suggested that perhaps they were episodic or periodic.

01:30:57.000 Every 20 million years or so, there was a little dip in the fossil record.

01:31:02.000 And we said, well, all right.

01:31:04.000 By the way, geologists look for indicators in the fossil record.

01:31:08.000 And in the rock record to demark where one era, one period, one epoch begins and another one ends.

01:31:16.000 So, for example, the dinosaurs croaked at the beginning, 65 million years ago, at the KT boundary.

01:31:23.000 It's got some other name lately.

01:31:24.000 I haven't kept up with that.

01:31:25.000 But that boundary, they knew it was a boundary, so they dated, they called that a different geologic zone, that which followed 65 million years ago compared to that which came before it.

01:31:36.000 And they did that long before they knew what the hell happened there.

01:31:40.000 We would later learn that an asteroid struck, and there surely were some supervolcano activity in what are called the Deccan Traps.

01:31:48.000 And so there was a lot of bad stuff going on in the Earth at that time.

01:31:52.000 So it was hostile to life.

01:31:53.000 We lost 70% of the world's life species in that period of time.

01:31:58.000 Right there, 65 million years ago.

01:32:00.000 It was devastating.

01:32:03.000 But awesome for us, because that's how we're here, right?

01:32:05.000 Yeah, in fact.

01:32:06.000 Flowering plants.

01:32:07.000 So asteroids are our friends.

01:32:08.000 Yes, they reset the world. 0.98

01:32:10.000 We had a fucked up environment. 0.99

01:32:11.000 It was a bad neighborhood. 1.00

01:32:13.000 Dinosaurs were everywhere.

01:32:14.000 Bad for us.

01:32:15.000 We couldn't make it. 0.92

01:32:16.000 We were just rats back then.

01:32:17.000 We were scurrying underfoot as early rodents, yes.

01:32:21.000 And we were just hors d'oeuvres for T-Rex, basically.

01:32:24.000 And you take them out of the ecological niche, we can then...

01:32:28.000 Aspire to evolve to something more interesting than a tree tree.

01:32:32.000 Something that can consider the Kuiper Belt.

01:32:34.000 Yes.

01:32:34.000 So it was imagined that maybe there's an object out there that's so far away you can't see it.

01:32:40.000 But it's on this huge looping orbit that comes by the sun every 20 million years.

01:32:47.000 Because that's the cycle of these extinction episodes.

01:32:51.000 And if that's the case, no, it doesn't hit us.

01:32:54.000 It has to stay around for the next cycle, so what does it do?

01:32:57.000 It has a gravitational field that perturbs these outer comets and sends a rain of comets down into the inner solar system, creating impact extinctions on a cycle of every 20 million years.

01:33:10.000 This was proposed back in the 1980s.

01:33:12.000 But it's not an object that anyone has ever seen.

01:33:15.000 It's an object whose existence was inferred or asserted based on the record of extinction in the fossil record.

01:33:26.000 A further analysis of the fossil record doesn't actually hold up this cyclical extinction pattern.

01:33:32.000 It's more erratic than that, and so you can't really...

01:33:35.000 So it's evaporated as an idea.

01:33:38.000 But it was clever and intriguing and got a lot of headlines at the time.

01:33:41.000 I don't think it's the same thing that what I read.

01:33:43.000 What I read was from 2010. It was something about the Oort cloud, O-O-R-T cloud.

01:33:49.000 Yeah, that's a swarm of comets.

01:33:51.000 A swarm of comets, not quite halfway to the nearest star, but very far out there.

01:33:57.000 That is sort of the outer reaches of the gravitational grasp.

01:34:02.000 Of the Sun.

01:34:03.000 If you go much beyond that, your gravitational allegiance is uncertain and you could fall into the next star rather than fall towards the Sun.

01:34:11.000 The 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.

01:34:22.000 They believe that there's something up to 25% of them Okay, four times as big as Jupiter could be responsible for sending these objects in our direction.

01:34:34.000 Is this just a random theory that these guys put together that wasn't completely accepted?

01:34:39.000 No, no, no.

01:34:40.000 There's no known such object.

01:34:42.000 What people are doing, and I don't fault them for it, it's creative, it would make awesome science fiction storytelling, is there's something you need to explain here on Earth.

01:34:51.000 Somebody went extinct.

01:34:52.000 There was some wave of comets.

01:34:54.000 There's some observation that was never repeated.

01:34:58.000 There's something you've got to come up with.

01:35:00.000 And so you say, well, we know the Oort cloud exists.

01:35:02.000 We know you can perturb those orbits and send them careening down towards the inner solar system.

01:35:10.000 And those that Jupiter doesn't bat away, like batting practice, those that get through Jupiter's gravitational shield could wreak havoc on Earth.

01:35:18.000 Yeah, but it's inventing a lot to explain something you don't know.

01:35:25.000 So 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.

01:35:36.000 So, it's fun speculation.

01:35:38.000 Fun speculation, exactly.

01:35:39.000 But beyond that, to say, oh, it's real, it must be happening, no.

01:35:42.000 No, it's just, let someone write a good sci-fi story on it.

01:35:45.000 Here's what's fun about it, and this is why I bring it up.

01:35:48.000 Most people, I've talked about this subject to many, many people, and I myself, personally, I'm not immune to this.

01:35:55.000 I find it very fascinating.

01:35:56.000 However, how much have I looked into the actual planets that we absolutely know are real? 0.97

01:36:02.000 Not that much, but I'm worried about this fucking fake planet that may or may not exist. 0.98

01:36:06.000 Dude, they might have found another planet! 0.99

01:36:08.000 It's this idea of something hidden and mysterious which is so compelling and attractive to people.

01:36:14.000 That's a fascinating psychological observation.

01:36:16.000 It's a weird thing.

01:36:17.000 We want to believe there's something mysterious that we don't understand and could be there but we don't know anything about yet.

01:36:25.000 Where there's plenty of things we do know something about, but we want to know more.

01:36:29.000 Why don't you help?

01:36:30.000 Yes.

01:36:30.000 And by the way, the universe is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine.

01:36:38.000 And so to say I need your creativity and...

01:36:47.000 No, we've got black holes that are flaying stars layer by layer.

01:36:53.000 Do 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?

01:37:07.000 You just broke the internet.

01:37:08.000 You just broke the whole internet right there.

01:37:10.000 So, let's talk about that!

01:37:13.000 All right?

01:37:14.000 You know, why are we wasting time talking about whether the Saturn V rocket...

01:37:17.000 I mean... 0.99

01:37:18.000 Because we're fascinated by shit that's unproven. 1.00

01:37:20.000 Mysterious shit. 1.00

01:37:21.000 Look, I got a broken brain, okay? 1.00

01:37:23.000 There's a reason for me.

01:37:24.000 You want some more cool stuff?

01:37:25.000 All right?

01:37:26.000 Mars once had liquid running water coursing on its surface.

01:37:31.000 Unquestionably right.

01:37:31.000 It has geologic, Marsologic features that are...

01:37:49.000 We're good to go.

01:38:06.000 My point is, if any time in the past Mars had liquid running water, every place on Earth there's liquid running water, there's life.

01:38:16.000 There's evidence to think that Mars was habitable With liquid running water before Earth was.

01:38:23.000 Well, see, then you just started up another conspiracy theory.

01:38:26.000 That's the Richard Hoagland group of people that believed that there was pyramids and a face on Mars and there was civilization.

01:38:33.000 I have something better than that.

01:38:36.000 That if Mars was fertile for life before Earth, something we learned recently in the last 10 years, that asteroid impacts on a planet.

01:38:46.000 There you go.

01:38:46.000 I 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.

01:39:05.000 If Mars was fertile and formed life Microbial, though it may only have been, it's microbial life that can survive dehydration, high radiation,

01:39:21.000 absence of...

01:39:22.000 We have found what we call extremophiles on Earth, like I said a moment ago, that thrive under conditions that would kill us.

01:39:31.000 High pressure, low pressure, high temperature, low temperature, high radiation.

01:39:36.000 All of these conditions the microbes would have encountered On Mars, being thrust into space and making that journey.

01:39:45.000 Well, if that's possible, and if that's the case, then life on Earth could have been seeded by life on Mars, making every life form on Earth a descendant of Martians.

01:40:00.000 More importantly, why do we have bacteria that could survive high radiation in the first place?

01:40:08.000 What business does that have here beneath Earth's protective atmosphere, thriving in places where there isn't high radiation?

01:40:18.000 We have life forms that can survive what that trip through space would have been subjected to by a trip through space.

01:40:32.000 By the way, life does not evolve the way anyone typically thinks it does.

01:40:38.000 You're not some organism that then adapts to a new environment.

01:40:41.000 No, you just die.

01:40:42.000 The variation in organisms allows some to thrive in conditions that would otherwise kill you and it's my genetic offspring that continue.

01:40:54.000 Nobody adapted to anything.

01:40:56.000 Nature is selecting that subset of the variation in a generation that has survival properties for that next assault in the environment.

01:41:07.000 So, if Mars is teeming with life and microbes are flying into space as stowaways in the nooks and crannies of rocks, Then that population will be selected for those microbes that can survive that journey through space.

01:41:25.000 Does a planet need any sort of an atmosphere in order to support life or they just need water?

01:41:32.000 All we know is what can support life as we know it.

01:41:35.000 Right.

01:41:36.000 I don't know if we're inventive enough to invent other kinds of life form.

01:41:40.000 But life as we know it requires liquid water because that allows nutrients to move through our vessel that we call our bodies.

01:41:49.000 And right on down to microorganisms.

01:41:51.000 We all thrive and use liquid water and we need a heat source and more specifically a heat gradient.

01:41:58.000 There has to be a place where there's more energy in one place than somewhere else.

01:42:02.000 When you have a gradient, then you can create and sustain life as we know it.

01:42:07.000 Without that, there's no known way to do it.

01:42:09.000 So the entropy laws work against you to make life.

01:42:13.000 So...

01:42:14.000 So your point is that these...

01:42:15.000 It's possible that organisms could be growing even on asteroids then.

01:42:21.000 Oh, sorry.

01:42:22.000 So your point was, do we need an atmosphere?

01:42:23.000 Yeah.

01:42:24.000 Well, recent evidence suggests that possibly more than half of the mass of biology, the biomass of Earth...

01:42:36.000 Lives and thrives beneath Earth's surface, not on its surface.

01:42:43.000 If that's the case, what's going on in the atmosphere is relatively irrelevant.

01:42:49.000 If you're thriving deep within a nook and cranny of a rock a mile down, But don't they have some air down there?

01:42:55.000 Yeah, there's some air, but it's not cycling with what's going on in our air.

01:43:01.000 So the rules become broader or altered from what you would presume the life requires.

01:43:10.000 So to talk about a planet being habitable, we should no longer think only of what the surface of that planet supplies.

01:43:20.000 We need to think more broadly about What could go on deep within its surface as well?

01:43:25.000 We're pretty sure there are no large macroscopic organisms lumbering around, like in Journey to the Center of the Earth of Jules Verne, where there are creatures down there.

01:43:35.000 Hollow Earth.

01:43:36.000 Yeah, Hollow Earth.

01:43:36.000 No, there's no evidence that we have huge creatures.

01:43:39.000 The 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.

01:43:50.000 When I say huge, I mean hundreds of miles large.

01:43:55.000 No, the system would collapse into that rapidly.

01:43:59.000 You can get smaller cavities like Carlsbad Caverns, that sort of thing, but nothing staggeringly large.

01:44:08.000 Now, when you consider all the possibilities for life in the universe, which are, you know, almost infinite, right?

01:44:16.000 Yeah, there are probably more ways to make life than we haven't thought of than the way to make life that is, that we know of, you know, here on Earth.

01:44:24.000 We're just not imaginative.

01:44:26.000 We just don't...

01:44:27.000 You know, I'm reminded of, if I get a little literate on you for a moment, in the late 18th century, there's a book published called Cosmotheros by Christian Huygens.

01:44:40.000 And he was a polymath.

01:44:42.000 He was a great in math and physics and biology.

01:44:45.000 He wrote a book exploring what life might be like on all the planets.

01:44:49.000 And listen to this reasoning.

01:44:51.000 This is hilarious.

01:44:52.000 He said, Well it's clear it's got an atmosphere because through a telescope you see bands of gas moving across its surface.

01:45:02.000 Well if it has an atmosphere then life forms there would probably exploit that atmosphere the way we do.

01:45:11.000 Because it has an atmosphere it means it probably has rain Because we get rain out of our atmosphere.

01:45:17.000 If it has rain, it must have oceans.

01:45:19.000 If it has oceans, they must need a means for traveling.

01:45:23.000 So they would build ships with sails.

01:45:27.000 And if those ships have sails, they would need rope.

01:45:29.000 So they probably have hemp.

01:45:33.000 Wow.

01:45:34.000 So this was obviously extrapolation to an extreme.

01:45:37.000 Right.

01:45:38.000 But just analyze that for one split second.

01:45:41.000 Every supposition...

01:45:45.000 I think?

01:46:06.000 Think about how much of our lives are influenced, how much of our society is built on services that bring pleasure to our senses.

01:46:17.000 Our sense of touch.

01:46:19.000 You can go get a massage. 0.99

01:46:21.000 Damn right you can. 0.98

01:46:23.000 If you know the right place. 0.97

01:46:25.000 Our sense of taste.

01:46:27.000 There is food brought to high cuisine.

01:46:30.000 Our sense of hearing.

01:46:32.000 We make beautiful music.

01:46:34.000 Our sense of sight.

01:46:35.000 We make great art.

01:46:36.000 So much of what we do is to satisfy our five traditional senses.

01:46:41.000 Imagine if we had ten senses or twenty.

01:46:43.000 I have a theory on that.

01:46:44.000 It's called the fart principle.

01:46:46.000 I have no idea.

01:46:47.000 Understanding of how that principle could relate to this, but I'm all ears.

01:46:50.000 Well, this is why.

01:46:51.000 If you did not have a nose, and you could live your whole life without a sense of smell in the year 2012, it's very possible.

01:46:58.000 If someone farted in front of you, you'd have no idea that this terrible gas is inhaling.

01:47:04.000 You wouldn't have that sense of smell.

01:47:06.000 So you could exist and not have any idea, because gas is invisible.

01:47:10.000 Okay, that's a bad example, and I'll tell you why.

01:47:13.000 That's a good example.

01:47:13.000 No, no, I'll tell you why.

01:47:14.000 It could be alien life form all around us all the time that we don't have the sense to, like, it's like worms can't see.

01:47:21.000 Joe, you'll be able to taste it.

01:47:23.000 But we can.

01:47:24.000 So two things.

01:47:25.000 So first, it's a good example in the sense that, no pun intended, in the sense that without Who knows what senses we're missing and therefore who knows what there is to measure in our world around us that we are completely missing?

01:47:40.000 I'll get back to that in a minute.

01:47:42.000 Regarding your fart theory, here's the problem.

01:47:46.000 My theory's up for peer review right now.

01:47:49.000 It is totally getting peer reviewed.

01:47:51.000 It's the right thing to call it too. 0.82

01:47:52.000 It's a legitimate hypothesis.

01:47:54.000 Thank you.

01:47:54.000 It's out on the table.

01:47:56.000 Now here you go.

01:47:56.000 You ready?

01:47:58.000 One of the active ingredients in the smell of a fart is hydrogen sulfide.

01:48:03.000 It turns out hydrogen sulfide is extremely lethal, is one of the most lethal gases that exists.

01:48:16.000 Well, why do we have such a good sense of smell for that?

01:48:22.000 Why don't we smell other gas?

01:48:24.000 Why don't we smell nitrogen?

01:48:26.000 Well, we don't need to smell nitrogen because it's not going to kill us because it's 78% of what you breathe anyway.

01:48:35.000 We have evolved a hypersensitive sense for the smell of hydrogen sulfide.

01:48:46.000 If you gave birth to someone who said hydrogen sulfide smells beautiful and let's smell more of it, let's get canisters of it, they're dead ten minutes later, no longer able to propagate the gene that liked the smell of hydrogen sulfide.

01:49:04.000 We had to not like that smell, otherwise we would not have survived By the way, hydrogen sulfide is a byproduct of the digestive activity of anaerobic microbes.

01:49:21.000 That's why it comes out of your lower intestine, not only where the sun don't shine, but where oxygen doesn't exist.

01:49:27.000 The microbes that thrive down there, they are anaerobic, and hydrogen sulfide is one of their byproducts.

01:49:35.000 It has been theorized that there have been places and times on Earth Where the ocean currents stopped.

01:49:43.000 And when ocean currents stop, oxygen at the surface of the ocean never makes it to the bottom.

01:49:51.000 So you can't sustain oxygen life forms at the bottom of the ocean.

01:49:57.000 There wouldn't be any fishes down there if the ocean currents stopped.

01:50:02.000 Because the ocean currents not only go from one place to another in the world, they circulate top to bottom.

01:50:08.000 So it's a two-dimensional thing going on, three dimensions actually.

01:50:12.000 So if something happens on Earth where you stop the oceanic cycles, you can create a condition in the lower ocean Where anaerobic lifeforms thrive.

01:50:24.000 And if they thrive, they outgas.

01:50:26.000 And one of their outgases is hydrogen sulfide.

01:50:29.000 It will gurgle up from the bottom of the ocean, rise up near the shores, turning shorelines into the smell of cesspools.

01:50:37.000 If you were alive at the time and didn't run away from that, you would have simply died from it.

01:50:44.000 That is all well and good.

01:50:46.000 Therefore, the nose theory, that if we didn't have a nose, we could all just fart.

01:50:51.000 If we didn't have a nose, we wouldn't have noticed hydrogen sulfide, and humans would not have survived it, and some other creature would be having this interview right now.

01:50:59.000 I agree with you and disagree with you at the same time.

01:51:03.000 And here's why.

01:51:05.000 What you're saying involves real people and real life adaptation to our environment. 0.96

01:51:10.000 What I'm talking about is aliens that are just like farts.

01:51:16.000 This is why you gave me a crazy, long-winded, really in-depth explanation, but you still don't discredit the possibility that just like the sense of smell.

01:51:28.000 It exists, but it is invisible.

01:51:31.000 There could be many things around us that are also invisible, but we have not developed any means to detect them.

01:51:38.000 Okay, you were being metaphorical. 0.98

01:51:39.000 Shit works, right? 1.00

01:51:40.000 Wi-Fi. 1.00

01:51:41.000 Wait, so you're being metaphorical with your fart theory?

01:51:44.000 Yes!

01:51:44.000 I'm not saying that you could live, no one would have had to have a nose to know Earth farting.

01:51:50.000 So I overanalyzed. 0.95

01:51:52.000 You went crazy with it, man!

01:51:54.000 You beat it down!

01:51:55.000 I like it, though.

01:51:56.000 That was cool.

01:51:57.000 It was cool.

01:51:58.000 By the way, one global warming scenario is the current...

01:52:02.000 Yes.

01:52:02.000 Did you see The Day After Tomorrow?

01:52:04.000 Did you see that unbelievably horrible movie?

01:52:06.000 Yeah, that one went to new lows.

01:52:09.000 So good.

01:52:09.000 So good it was bad.

01:52:10.000 When there was the cancer baby and everybody else is dead outside, but she's surviving with the cancer baby and she's going to stay there for the kid.

01:52:16.000 Maybe a hundred billion people are dead.

01:52:18.000 It's an awesome movie.

01:52:19.000 Awesome bad movie. 0.54

01:52:19.000 Let me get back to your nose, your fart nose. 0.54

01:52:21.000 He's crazy! 0.99

01:52:22.000 Okay, so now here's why you're probably not right. 0.88

01:52:27.000 Well, I'm definitely not right. 0.97

01:52:28.000 Look, it's a ridiculous idea. 0.96

01:52:30.000 No, no, no, no, no, no, no. 0.97

01:52:31.000 But there's a reason why you're probably not right.

01:52:34.000 Okay.

01:52:34.000 Okay?

01:52:34.000 Because beginning in the 1600s, we learned that our senses are not only...

01:52:42.000 They not only fool us, they occasionally don't work...

01:52:50.000 They're not all that the universe tells us.

01:52:57.000 They don't have the capacity to recognize all that's going on in the universe.

01:53:04.000 Well, certainly at a microscopic level.

01:53:06.000 Well, that's my point.

01:53:06.000 That's my point.

01:53:07.000 So in the early 1600s, two important advances, actually late 1500s, you had the invention of the microscope and you had the invention of the telescope.

01:53:18.000 This is really the first steps to enhance our senses beyond what our human biology endowed us with.

01:53:29.000 And upon doing so We discovered things about the world that were previously oblivious to us.

01:53:36.000 We discovered nose farts.

01:53:38.000 When Leeuwenhoek brought his telescope, his microscope, to a drop of pond water and saw what were called animacules.

01:53:50.000 What else were you going to call?

01:53:51.000 The little things, paramecia and protozoa, thriving in a drop of water.

01:53:58.000 That was a nose fart, keeping with your vocabulary.

01:54:02.000 That was something that previously no one had any idea was there.

01:54:06.000 And 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,

01:54:22.000 but more importantly, give us whole kinds of senses that your five senses could have never even imagined, that our human biology couldn't even approximate.

01:54:36.000 So what's an example?

01:54:39.000 Yeah, we don't have sensors to detect magnetic field at all.

01:54:45.000 That'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.

01:54:55.000 We don't have sensors for it.

01:54:56.000 You don't have sensors...

01:54:58.000 For radio.

01:54:59.000 Or radio waves.

01:55:00.000 Well, the difference there is we do have sensors for...

01:55:05.000 One aspect of the electromagnetic spectrum.

01:55:08.000 We have sensors for infrared, visible, and a delayed sense for ultraviolet.

01:55:15.000 Is that me?

01:55:16.000 Oh, wow.

01:55:16.000 Sorry about that.

01:55:16.000 That's pretty loud.

01:55:17.000 And a creative ringtone, just like mine.

01:55:19.000 See?

01:55:20.000 I learned that cleats aren't dangerous.

01:55:22.000 He goes old school.

01:55:22.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:55:24.000 So the point is, the radio waves are part of the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

01:55:30.000 We have access to some of that, and we call that For obvious reasons, visible light.

01:55:35.000 But outside of the range of visible light, you have ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays, radio waves, microwaves.

01:55:41.000 So yes, we can't see radio waves, but that would just be an extension of our senses in the way Geordi in Star Trek, the next generation, had his visor.

01:55:51.000 That visor allowed him to see the entire...

01:55:54.000 Did you just go Star Trek on us?

01:55:55.000 I had to go there just because I had to.

01:55:58.000 And my sideburns are Star Trek sideburns.

01:56:01.000 I don't know if you know.

01:56:01.000 So he puts the...

01:56:03.000 Well, that visor enabled him to see the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

01:56:07.000 If we were thusly equipped, you'd walk down the street and the microwave towers would be ablaze with microwaves.

01:56:14.000 And 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.

01:56:24.000 If you want to see if there's a burglar entering your house, just shift over to infrared.

01:56:32.000 If the burglar is warm-blooded, they will show up even if all the lights are out.

01:56:37.000 Like the predator.

01:56:38.000 Exactly.

01:56:39.000 It's another way to detect the light.

01:56:41.000 So science has broadened our senses and given us senses that our human biology could not have even thought of or invented.

01:56:52.000 So the notion at this day and age that something is happening on this tabletop That is eluding us I think is just simply unlikely because we're so good now at finding things that previously escaped our notice right in front of us.

01:57:11.000 Right now that frontier is at the energy extremes of the CERN accelerator in Switzerland.

01:57:17.000 That frontier is at the James Webb Space Telescope where we're going to look at the earliest formation of matter in the history of the universe.

01:57:25.000 These are the extremes Of our measurements of nature today.

01:57:31.000 The 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?

01:57:42.000 Or do we know that there was a birth?

01:57:44.000 Is that 100% sure that before the Big Bang there was no...

01:57:51.000 There was something?

01:57:52.000 Was there anything?

01:57:53.000 Do we know that?

01:57:54.000 Yeah, so...

01:57:56.000 We don't know what happened before the Big Bang.

01:57:59.000 So that's my first and highest level answer to you.

01:58:03.000 That doesn't mean some people don't have some creative ideas, but the only real answer is we don't know.

01:58:11.000 And we have top people working on it.

01:58:13.000 So now some of the creative ideas are quantum physics, which is the most successful theory of physics there ever was, quantum theory.

01:58:22.000 tells us that the early universe may have been a fluctuation in the laws of physics allowing other fluctuations at the same time so that we are but one bubble of many comprising an infinite set of bubbles Deserving the retrospectively obvious name,

01:58:45.000 multiverse.

01:58:47.000 The multiverse theories are scary.

01:58:48.000 The multiverse.

01:58:49.000 And so, if there's a multiverse, then we're just one bubble.

01:58:54.000 And this multiverse is just churning them out.

01:58:56.000 Some of them, by the way, we're on a one-way expansion trip.

01:59:00.000 Other universes, the laws of physics might be slightly different.

01:59:03.000 The initial conditions might be slightly altered from ours.

01:59:06.000 And it would expand and then re-collapse.

01:59:09.000 They'd have a big squeeze at the end.

01:59:12.000 Some universes might be created without any matter at all.

01:59:15.000 So you have a universe with no one to contemplate it.

01:59:18.000 We happen to have a universe where the matter and energy within it assembled and achieved consciousness.

01:59:26.000 So 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.

01:59:36.000 Not that we know of, but there could be a way we might be able to invent a multiverse transport kit where you leave your universe and enter another.

01:59:44.000 But I don't recommend that.

01:59:46.000 Because if the laws of physics are even slightly different, the charge on the electron, the mass of the neutron, if any of these are slightly different, then everything that holds you together,

02:00:02.000 all the physical laws...

02:00:05.000 That come together to make you, including all the forces of nature, they would just completely collapse Yeah.

02:00:36.000 So I flip them a coin and they catch it.

02:00:38.000 If they don't explode together, annihilation, then I'll shake their hand and say, welcome to Earth.

02:00:45.000 Wouldn't they explode just touching the ground then?

02:00:47.000 Yeah, well, they might have hover glide or something. 0.99

02:00:50.000 Oh, they could be gliding and shit. 0.92

02:00:51.000 Well, plus they're touching the atmosphere, which is matter. 0.92

02:00:53.000 So if I meet them in space, let's say.

02:00:56.000 So if they're made of antimatter and you shake hands, everybody dies.

02:00:58.000 You completely annihilate.

02:00:59.000 That's correct.

02:01:00.000 Jesus!

02:01:01.000 Yeah.

02:01:01.000 So that's what happens in our own universe.

02:01:03.000 Imagine some other universe.

02:01:05.000 There's no telling how our laws of physics would interact with each other.

02:01:08.000 So you ask what's before the universe?

02:01:10.000 It may be the multiverse.

02:01:12.000 But now?

02:01:13.000 Now.

02:01:14.000 Now.

02:01:15.000 When you point that finger I get nervous.

02:01:18.000 So there's cogent physics reasons to think that there's a multiverse and quantum physics takes us there.

02:01:26.000 There's also good philosophical reason to think that there's a multiverse, because in our experience discovering the cosmos, the universe never makes anything in ones.

02:01:38.000 When we thought Earth is it, no, Earth is just one of many other planets.

02:01:42.000 Well, the Sun is...

02:01:43.000 No, the Sun is one of a hundred billion stars in the galaxy.

02:01:46.000 Well, the Milky Way...

02:01:48.000 No, no, there's a hundred billion other galaxies...

02:01:52.000 In the universe.

02:01:54.000 Well, the universe?

02:01:56.000 Well, we've been there before.

02:01:58.000 Am I going to say there's one universe?

02:02:01.000 Ultimately, isn't there just one universe in the universe consisting of billions and billions of infinite amounts?

02:02:07.000 I'm getting there.

02:02:07.000 So watch the vocabulary.

02:02:09.000 So we have this one universe, but I don't want to think there's one universe because the trend line says differently.

02:02:17.000 So maybe there's this multiverse.

02:02:20.000 Well, that just continues to push the question a little deeply.

02:02:24.000 If the universe never makes...

02:02:25.000 If this entity never makes anything in ones, then why would it only make one multiverse?

02:02:33.000 Jesus Christ!

02:02:34.000 So then...

02:02:35.000 So maybe there are multiple multiverses.

02:02:46.000 And then it's turtles all the way down, as they say.

02:02:53.000 Like I said, we don't have a handle on it yet, but we've solved other origin problems, because what started this was your question about birth and death.

02:03:00.000 There was a time when we didn't know how the Earth began.

02:03:02.000 We have a good idea of that now, and how the moon formed.

02:03:05.000 We've got that.

02:03:06.000 How the sun formed, we got that.

02:03:08.000 No, we weren't around five billion years ago to watch it, but you don't need to be.

02:03:11.000 There are very clever ways to know what happened in the past.

02:03:14.000 Geologists have been doing it ever since the field was born.

02:03:19.000 There's a record Writ for geologists in the rocks, telling you where they've been, what temperature they were exposed to, and how long they've been sitting there.

02:03:29.000 We look at the sun.

02:03:31.000 No, we can't go back in time with it, but we can look at other stars.

02:03:35.000 We look out in the galaxy, there's so many stars!

02:03:38.000 We're catching some being born.

02:03:40.000 We're catching others dying.

02:03:42.000 We're catching some in orbit around each other.

02:03:44.000 And we're seeing some that don't exist anymore.

02:03:46.000 Because by the time their light reaches us, they've already faded out.

02:03:49.000 There'll be some of them that, in fact, at this instant, no longer exist, and that information has yet to reach us.

02:03:54.000 Isn't that...

02:03:55.000 That's insane!

02:03:56.000 And by the way, that happens several hundred times a year.

02:04:00.000 We observe what are called supernovae.

02:04:02.000 Yes, I was going to ask you about that.

02:04:03.000 Stars that explode.

02:04:04.000 We watch them explode and we date them from when we see them explode.

02:04:08.000 But hell, they'd exploded long ago, depending on their distance.

02:04:11.000 If they're a thousand light years away, they exploded a thousand years ago.

02:04:15.000 But you had no knowledge of it until today.

02:04:17.000 There was a fantastic documentary on hypernovas and it was so mind-boggling because they went back to the birth of the discovery of hypernovas and when they initially were theorizing that it was warfare in space.

02:04:30.000 I'll tell you what that story was.

02:04:32.000 So in the 1970s, after the United States and Russia, the Soviet Union, signed a surface test ban treaty where you couldn't test nuclear weapons on Earth's surface, there's the old military credo,

02:04:47.000 trust but verify.

02:04:48.000 We said, all right, we'll sign this treaty, but we're going to keep an eye on you.

02:04:52.000 So 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.

02:05:03.000 That's one of these bands in the electromagnetic spectrum.

02:05:06.000 The highest energy band for which we have a word to describe it.

02:05:10.000 Gamma rays.

02:05:12.000 Dr. Banner was exposed to that made him...

02:05:15.000 Oh, don't you think I'm not aware? 0.97

02:05:16.000 ...big, green, and ugly.

02:05:17.000 So that's not actually what would happen to you if you're exposed to him, but we'll give the comics the scientific latitude.

02:05:25.000 So you have this...

02:05:27.000 So what happens?

02:05:29.000 So they launch this detector.

02:05:31.000 And, you know, seven, eight, nine, ten times a week, This satellite with this detector on board detects bursts of gamma rays.

02:05:41.000 And the Pentagon scrambled and they said, you know, what's going on?

02:05:45.000 Are they actually detonating these weapons?

02:05:47.000 And they looked at satellite, other satellite, secondary, tertiary information.

02:05:52.000 Soviet Union was silent.

02:05:53.000 There was no evidence of any nuclear testing at all.

02:05:57.000 And that was the birth, that day to the day of the publication of that paper.

02:06:02.000 That reported on these daily bursts.

02:06:04.000 That was the birth of the field of astrophysics called gamma-ray astronomy.

02:06:10.000 And we now have other gamma-ray telescopes out there studying these.

02:06:14.000 They are explosions, and they're happening at the edge of the universe, and their sources are hypernovae.

02:06:21.000 We needed a word bigger than supernovae, and these are the biggest explosions known in the universe, so we call them hypernovae.

02:06:28.000 And the amount of power produced by a hypernova.

02:06:31.000 Oh yeah, it's extraordinary.

02:06:33.000 What matters more than that it's a lot of power is that it's very focused.

02:06:38.000 It comes out in two beams.

02:06:40.000 One in one direction and one in the other.

02:06:42.000 And if you happen to be in the beam, that's all she wrote.

02:06:44.000 You're done, son.

02:06:44.000 That's it.

02:06:45.000 Yeah, if there were a hypernovae anywhere in our galaxy...

02:06:48.000 Everybody's done.

02:06:49.000 ...in the entire galaxy, and it was beamed towards Earth, we're toast.

02:06:53.000 Literally and figuratively.

02:06:55.000 Wrap your head around that, kids.

02:06:57.000 There's a hundred billion stars at least, right?

02:07:00.000 In this galaxy.

02:07:01.000 Yeah, but most...

02:07:02.000 I mean, a hypernova is a very special and rare kind of star.

02:07:04.000 Eight times a day?

02:07:06.000 Well, no.

02:07:07.000 In the universe.

02:07:08.000 Yeah.

02:07:09.000 Eight times a day.

02:07:09.000 Eight times a week.

02:07:10.000 Eight times a week.

02:07:11.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:07:11.000 Between seven and ten times a week.

02:07:12.000 Once a day.

02:07:13.000 In the entire universe.

02:07:14.000 Wow.

02:07:15.000 So that tells you how rare it is.

02:07:19.000 It takes 150 to 100 billion galaxies...

02:07:23.000 Each with 100 billion stars to give you eight of these a week.

02:07:30.000 Yeah, so by the way, there's an interesting way that this will render us toast.

02:07:35.000 So the first wave of gamma rays will take out our ozone layer.

02:07:39.000 The ozone absorbs high energy radiation.

02:07:41.000 That's what protects us from – it's what absorbs most of the ultraviolet from the sun.

02:07:47.000 Otherwise, ultraviolet is hostile to life, to life on the surface, and there wouldn't be life as we know it without this ozone layer on Earth.

02:07:57.000 But you can overrun the ozone layer.

02:08:00.000 The 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.

02:08:16.000 It took the ultraviolet light out of the picture.

02:08:20.000 It's gone.

02:08:21.000 That's why it protects us.

02:08:22.000 Okay?

02:08:23.000 So, if there's a gamma ray burst, more high-energy photons will hit us than there are O3 molecules in our ozone layer.

02:08:36.000 So, they all hit.

02:08:38.000 And they break apart the O3s And it's like the first wave of, what are the, cavalry?

02:08:47.000 Who are the first ones in the battle?

02:08:49.000 Marines?

02:08:49.000 They get all shot up, right?

02:08:51.000 I mean, in the old-fashioned battles.

02:08:52.000 They run in, they get shot up, okay?

02:08:55.000 The first wave comes in, protects us from some of it, but it overruns the ozone layer.

02:09:00.000 The rest come in and basically starts breaking apart the molecular, the complex molecules that exist on Earth's surface.

02:09:07.000 That's how high energy the light is.

02:09:09.000 And generally we think of life as complex chemistry.

02:09:13.000 And the most complex form of chemistry we know.

02:09:16.000 And so we would not survive that.

02:09:18.000 That would be an extinction episode for all life on Earth.

02:09:22.000 Now, if you could burrow underground, that'd be cool.

02:09:25.000 Go there.

02:09:26.000 I wouldn't want to.

02:09:28.000 I'd rather just stop.

02:09:31.000 I think it's just too much to ask to survive something like that.

02:09:34.000 Grab a beer, get out your lawn chair, and watch it come.

02:09:37.000 Yeah, it just doesn't seem like anything you want to survive.

02:09:39.000 It seems like you have to sort of give in to the reality that the greater good of the universe will be fine. 0.90

02:09:44.000 It's time for the rats and roaches to rise up in our place.

02:09:47.000 Or whatever.

02:09:48.000 But it's like our own consciousness is so strung up on the idea of staying in this form, you know, physically alive and keep this thing, whatever this is, going.

02:09:58.000 Because of our survival instincts, it really sort of confuses and dilutes the whole idea of perception that the universe itself is not just infinite, but infinitely fractal.

02:10:09.000 Well, no, the average life expectancy of a mammal species is about 3 million years.

02:10:15.000 And I'm sure there's some of us out there who are thinking that we'll live for billions of years and planet hop and star hop.

02:10:22.000 And then there are people who are saying, well, we better learn how to terraform Mars because Earth is about to be completely messed up.

02:10:30.000 And those folks, I think, are misguided in their thinking.

02:10:34.000 Can I tell you why?

02:10:35.000 Sure, please.

02:10:36.000 Who doesn't want to terraform Mars? 0.96

02:10:38.000 I don't want to.

02:10:39.000 They did it on...

02:10:40.000 I got kids.

02:10:42.000 You don't want another planet to visit?

02:10:44.000 That'd be a fun vacation spot.

02:10:46.000 I have no issues.

02:10:47.000 But don't do that because you want another place to live to escape the fact that we're destroying our own Earth.

02:10:53.000 The environment and the oceans and the atmosphere.

02:10:56.000 Here's why.

02:10:57.000 It's a very simple argument.

02:10:59.000 If 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?

02:11:11.000 Of course.

02:11:11.000 If you have the power of geoengineering, you don't have to leave the planet your arm, turn another one into Earth and move there.

02:11:19.000 Fix Earth! 0.92

02:11:20.000 Yes.

02:11:21.000 Thank you.

02:11:21.000 It seems like just a step in the stage of innovation.

02:11:24.000 As long as human beings have access to energy, we're going to figure out how to get energy from pollution and get energy from...

02:11:30.000 There's going to be...

02:11:30.000 With the massive amounts of progress that have been made just in the last 200 years, I always like to describe to people, if they really have a hard time wrapping their head around it, That 200 years ago, if you wanted a picture of something, you had to draw it.

02:11:43.000 Just stop and look at that.

02:11:45.000 That's a great, great observation.

02:11:46.000 And it's such a small amount of time that a massive amount of stuff has happened.

02:11:50.000 And if you stop and think about what we're capable of, like, man, who knows?

02:11:55.000 I mean, I don't know the answer to overpopulation.

02:11:57.000 I don't know the answer.

02:11:58.000 But I do know that I would have never figured out Wi-Fi on my own.

02:12:02.000 I would have never figured out how to send a satellite signal. 0.99

02:12:05.000 Who the fuck... 0.98

02:12:06.000 Even understands what's going on when you get online. 1.00

02:12:09.000 Yeah, just think about what's going on in your car's GPS, right?

02:12:14.000 So it's talking to a satellite and mixing your location on Earth's surface with information that's in the later versions of it in your car updated from the internet.

02:12:24.000 About what direction the traffic flows on a street you happen to be driving on.

02:12:31.000 And whether the Dunkin' Donuts is open late.

02:12:34.000 Yeah, as long as there's money in fixing the environment, we're going to fix the environment.

02:12:38.000 Well, that's the challenge.

02:12:39.000 The trick is to make it so that people can actually find some benefit in improving.

02:12:44.000 In a capitalist free economy, that's the driver of it all.

02:12:48.000 Yeah, it pushes things and it also leaves a lot of bullshit in its wake and a lot of pollution and problems that... 0.53

02:12:54.000 I mean, I hope we figure it out before we eat up the rainforest. 0.91

02:12:58.000 I really do.

02:12:59.000 But if we don't, we could probably make a new rainforest one day.

02:13:02.000 We could probably figure out some way.

02:13:03.000 Just build one. 0.96

02:13:04.000 I mean, it's a fucked up way to look at things. 0.98

02:13:06.000 Like, we'll figure it out. 0.98

02:13:08.000 Don't worry.

02:13:09.000 But I think the doom and gloom analysis of we're doomed, there's no way, we're going to run out of food, I think that's kind of a silly way to look at it, too. 0.99

02:13:18.000 It seems to me that if you fly over just the United States alone, God, there's a lot of space to do shit. 0.99

02:13:23.000 Yeah, that's correct. 0.99

02:13:24.000 And if you wanted to do some shit on the moon or on Mars, you could kind of do it in Nevada as well. 0.97

02:13:29.000 You could find some spots in Utah that nobody's there, and you could put up a dome and grow some vegetables. 0.98

02:13:35.000 Well, what will happen is Earth keeps warming.

02:13:37.000 You saw the news that last year was by far the longest, the warmest year ever by far, 2012, the warmest year on Earth.

02:13:44.000 The warmest year since when?

02:13:49.000 Well, I didn't read the full depth of the article, but certainly the warmest on record.

02:13:53.000 The warmest that we've been keeping records of how warm the earth has been.

02:13:56.000 But not since like...

02:13:59.000 Jurassic?

02:13:59.000 Right, no, [...

02:14:01.000 In any time that civilization has been concerned about this.

02:14:05.000 And 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.

02:14:19.000 We'll live in Antarctica.

02:14:20.000 We'll be fine.

02:14:21.000 It'll redistribute where we think of as the heartland and the wheat belt.

02:14:29.000 We know now about Greenland and underneath all that ice.

02:14:33.000 The climate that once was.

02:14:36.000 There was a day when Earth had no ice poles and no ice caps at all.

02:14:41.000 Well, there was a day just 15,000, 16,000 years ago that half of North America was covered in ice.

02:14:46.000 I like the way you said just 15,000 years ago.

02:14:48.000 It's kind of crazy in the version of the universe. 0.92

02:14:51.000 Our silly lives.

02:14:52.000 And 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. 0.93

02:15:04.000 Wow.

02:15:04.000 And it's called Snowball Earth.

02:15:06.000 When was this?

02:15:06.000 Very cool.

02:15:07.000 I forgot the exact time that they've been...

02:15:09.000 It'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,

02:15:26.000 how high the temperature is versus what Earth is doing with the energy it received.

02:15:33.000 When you're a snowball, most of Earth's, the sun's light is reflected rather than absorbed.

02:15:38.000 Ah.

02:15:38.000 See that?

02:15:39.000 And so that's how you can get a runaway snowball, right?

02:15:42.000 So the ice caps grow a little bit and this is like global climate change in the other direction.

02:15:48.000 That's way worse, right?

02:15:49.000 It grows a little bit and then less sunlight gets absorbed by the earth because ice is white and so it freezes up a little more and then even less sunlight It gets kept, and then it freezes up a little more.

02:16:04.000 So you can have a runaway ice ball just as you can have a runaway greenhouse.

02:16:09.000 That's incredible.

02:16:10.000 That's interesting that these two possibilities exist.

02:16:14.000 And the glaciers, when they melt and they create water, and the water acts as a reflector, and the light goes through the water and melts the glaciers quicker.

02:16:22.000 Very similar, right?

02:16:27.000 And they're happy and nobody's disturbing them.

02:16:29.000 Then you maintain your atmospheric temperature and the energy balance of sunlight hitting the earth, some getting absorbed, other parts getting reflected.

02:16:39.000 But if you tip that balance...

02:16:42.000 By the way, that can shift.

02:16:43.000 That's not like a razor-edge balance.

02:16:46.000 I mean, there's slop in there.

02:16:48.000 Restorative forces exist.

02:16:50.000 But if you go outside of what a restorative force can give you, then you overrun the capacity...

02:16:56.000 To bring you back to any place where you once were.

02:17:00.000 And then you get a runaway phenomenon.

02:17:01.000 And so you heat, and when you heat something, it outgasses.

02:17:05.000 If you heat your soda, the CO2 comes out of it.

02:17:09.000 It doesn't stay in.

02:17:10.000 That's why we like drinking cold carbonated beverages.

02:17:13.000 So if you heat Earth, and greenhouse gases are dissolved within it, then you start releasing those greenhouse gases.

02:17:22.000 That makes Earth retain even more heat, makes it hotter, And if it makes it hotter, even more greenhouse gases come out.

02:17:29.000 And so you can imagine a situation where you have a runaway greenhouse where everything goes really hot.

02:17:33.000 Is that where we're at?

02:17:35.000 No.

02:17:36.000 Is everybody doom and gloom?

02:17:38.000 We're not runaway.

02:17:39.000 Earth has been this hot before and has recovered from it over time scales much longer than anybody's lifetime.

02:17:47.000 That's another problem here, right?

02:17:48.000 Earth has been much hotter than this.

02:17:50.000 It just was much hotter before humans or much hotter before human history?

02:17:54.000 Yeah, before human history.

02:17:55.000 Yeah.

02:17:56.000 And we have great evidence for this.

02:17:58.000 So, the issue is not will Earth survive it.

02:18:00.000 It'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.

02:18:11.000 And if we now become a force in nature's equation, Creating a cycling of phenomenon that would normally have taken 10,000 or 100,000 years, and we're doing it on a scale of centuries, then we better be prepared to face those consequences. 0.98

02:18:29.000 Much like your analogy of the clouds in a time-lapse fashion, the idea of living by the beach would be so fucking ridiculous.

02:18:36.000 If you ever saw the actual, like, Pangea change into continents... 0.90

02:18:42.000 It's like, why would you live near the water? 0.81

02:18:44.000 What are you crazy?

02:18:45.000 That's 80% of our population, right?

02:18:47.000 Exactly.

02:18:47.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:18:48.000 Because cities are based typically near water sources.

02:18:52.000 On river mouths or where transportation was useful.

02:18:57.000 You live in New York City?

02:18:58.000 In Manhattan, lower Manhattan.

02:19:00.000 Are you concerned about Sandy and the impact that it had?

02:19:03.000 It flooded Zone A and Zone A was four blocks from me, from my zone, which was Zone C. I walked four blocks, five blocks away and entire underground parking garages were flooded.

02:19:15.000 Cars were bobbing out of the exit doors of these parking garages.

02:19:19.000 Have you thought about Utah or maybe perhaps the Colorado mountains?

02:19:24.000 Because if you plan for the end of the world, I'm going where you're going.

02:19:28.000 I'm going to call you up, dude.

02:19:29.000 You better be straight with me.

02:19:31.000 Tell me where to hide.

02:19:32.000 I've got to tell you a cute story.

02:19:33.000 A friend of mine, Rick Binzel, who's a planetary astronomer.

02:19:38.000 He also created the risk scale for judging the likelihood of an asteroid that's recently been discovered.

02:19:45.000 He created the risk scale that will tell you the likelihood of that hitting Earth.

02:19:50.000 Now, he and I like to drink wine when we're together.

02:19:54.000 So if he's thinking that an asteroid is going to come one day, what's the first thing you ask him about his wine collection?

02:20:01.000 What's the first thing you ask him?

02:20:02.000 What are you going to drink?

02:20:03.000 Exactly.

02:20:04.000 What bottle of wine do you have that you're going to pull out the day you know the asteroid's coming?

02:20:08.000 So he was thinking maybe he could attach a little sensor behind that bottle, okay?

02:20:15.000 And it goes into my place and other friends of his.

02:20:17.000 So if he pulls that bottle out, a red light starts flashing, and you know, because he would be the first to know this.

02:20:25.000 It's his calculation that gets sent to the media, that gets sent to the press.

02:20:31.000 Okay.

02:20:31.000 Speaking of calculations, I have to talk to you about the conversation that you had.

02:20:36.000 Was the man's name Claude Shannon?

02:20:39.000 Was that the guy who was talking?

02:20:40.000 No, I never spoke to anyone named Claude Shannon.

02:20:42.000 I'm trying to remember what the scientist's name that was discovering or that was talking to you about the discovery of computer...

02:20:51.000 Oh, Jim Gates.

02:20:53.000 Jim Gates.

02:20:56.000 He's a professor of physics at the University of Maryland.

02:21:02.000 Self-correcting computer code found in the computations of quantum physics. 0.98

02:21:07.000 What the fuck does that mean? 0.69

02:21:09.000 I don't claim expertise in everything he said. 0.98

02:21:14.000 I had him on a panel.

02:21:15.000 We have an annual event at the American Museum of Natural History.

02:21:22.000 That's my day job there as director of the Hayden Planetarium.

02:21:27.000 Once a year we have this panel and I bring on My colleagues who are active on the bleeding frontier of some topic.

02:21:35.000 And I put them on stage and we all just fight about who's right or is there enough data?

02:21:41.000 Should I believe you?

02:21:43.000 Should I not?

02:21:43.000 And so it's the annual Isaac Asimov panel debate.

02:21:46.000 And it's designed to expose An aspect of science that the public hardly ever sees.

02:21:53.000 They usually see the perfectly written paper and the news report on it and everything is tidily discovered.

02:22:00.000 They don't see the bloody bleeding edge where the fisticuffs come out.

02:22:06.000 And so on this particular case, he, Jim Gates, discovered that there's a certain...

02:22:13.000 In our representation of the universe...

02:22:18.000 Yes, yes.

02:22:20.000 In 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.

02:22:45.000 It's called a checksum error.

02:22:47.000 You might have seen that in an error code.

02:22:50.000 Dump happens on your screen.

02:22:52.000 Go look in there.

02:22:52.000 You'll see the word checksum in multiple places.

02:22:54.000 It's one word, checksum. 0.99

02:22:56.000 And it's like the idiot check on, did this bulk of data get through this portal? 1.00

02:23:02.000 All right? 1.00

02:23:03.000 So, you know, you're looking at sort of the gross thing you can check for.

02:23:08.000 How many total bits were there?

02:23:10.000 I don't know if they're the right bits, but I know how many total bits should have come.

02:23:14.000 So let me check for that.

02:23:15.000 So that's the kind of thing you do in a checksum.

02:23:17.000 So he asserts that this exists deep within what we need to represent the operations of nature at its deepest, most fundamental levels.

02:23:28.000 It is the matrix written deep.

02:23:34.000 So I was astonished by this, and I paused, and actually there's a YouTube video of me interrogating him.

02:23:41.000 You asked him, yeah.

02:23:41.000 I'm interrogating him.

02:23:44.000 And now, I don't know that it's seen peer review yet.

02:23:47.000 He's a friend of mine, so I can just call him up.

02:23:50.000 But before you start getting...

02:23:54.000 Excited about it or bent out of shape about it or disturbed about it.

02:23:57.000 You want it to see peer review.

02:24:00.000 And the level of expertise in that analysis is above my pay scale.

02:24:05.000 So it's got to go to peers who do exactly that kind of mathematical physics.

02:24:10.000 And if they come out with a consensus and they agree, then I'm good to go.

02:24:14.000 And I'll invest more energy in coming to understand it.

02:24:17.000 But for every correct idea of how the universe works, there's hundreds and in some cases thousands of ideas that End up in the trash bin of creative thinking.

02:24:27.000 And so I have to allocate my energies and my budget of time.

02:24:33.000 And so it's intriguing and I'm happy to know that it exists, but to take it beyond that and wax philosophically poetic about it, maybe over a beer at a bar, but no, not in an actual setting where I'm talking about science.

02:24:48.000 Or maybe when you're high.

02:24:50.000 It's great fodder for conversation when you think you're being deep.

02:24:55.000 When you get done with your chemtrails talk, it's time to talk about computer simulation.

02:25:00.000 The universe is on a hard drive.

02:25:02.000 The multiverse is on a backup drive, like a RAID drive.

02:25:05.000 Oh, all the backup drives are the multiverse.

02:25:08.000 That's right.

02:25:09.000 That'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. 0.99

02:25:14.000 He's going to make you dumber if you keep going. 0.98

02:25:16.000 If you keep listening to him, he will propose some things that will ruin your brain. 0.96

02:25:21.000 The computer simulation theory has been bandied about in a bunch of different forms, and the idea being that one day we'll have infinite amounts of processing power and we'll be able to create a reality that is indiscernible from this reality.

02:25:34.000 And once that is done, how will we know when we're in it?

02:25:37.000 And could we be in it right now?

02:25:39.000 And this sounds like more high horseshit nonsense, but this is being bandied about by some of the smartest people on the planet. 0.96

02:25:46.000 Yeah, I remain unconvinced. 0.92

02:25:49.000 I mean, of what I've read, and you're talking about basically Kurzweil and the singularity hypothesis.

02:25:54.000 No, not necessarily.

02:25:55.000 But it folds in.

02:25:56.000 Sort of, I guess, yeah.

02:25:57.000 Because 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,

02:26:16.000 The hypothesis that one day we can just upload our entire brain into a computer, or a computer can simulate your brain in some fundamental way, then what do we need you for if we can now just simulate it?

02:26:28.000 I mean, here in LA, the actor's version of that is they've just digitized your body in every angle, doing everything.

02:26:34.000 What do we need you for?

02:26:36.000 Exactly.

02:26:37.000 They don't.

02:26:37.000 And we need to get rid of most actors.

02:26:41.000 They need to be outsourced.

02:26:42.000 I don't think the Actors Union is happy about that. 1.00

02:26:45.000 They can suck it. 1.00

02:26:46.000 They're unnecessary humans for the most part. 1.00

02:26:48.000 Some of them are beautiful, and for every Samuel Jackson, you've got a million douchebags.

02:26:53.000 That's reality.

02:26:54.000 It's just a flawed institution.

02:26:56.000 Blue cigarettes.

02:26:58.000 What'd you say, buddy?

02:26:59.000 Blue cigarettes.

02:27:01.000 Oh, Stephen Dorff.

02:27:02.000 You ever seen those ads?

02:27:03.000 No, no.

02:27:03.000 You want to prove there's a broad spectrum of intelligent life on this planet itself?

02:27:08.000 You need to see the ad for blue cigarettes.

02:27:10.000 It's a black and white ad where Stephen Dorff is telling you how cool it is to smoke electronic cigarettes.

02:27:16.000 It's the second douchiest commercial that's ever existed.

02:27:19.000 The first is Brad Pitt's Chanel No.

02:27:21.000 5 commercial.

02:27:22.000 Have you seen that?

02:27:23.000 I've only seen the stills and all of the perfumeries. 1.00

02:27:25.000 You want to become a dumber person? 0.99

02:27:26.000 I can show you. 1.00

02:27:27.000 I can make you dumber. 1.00

02:27:28.000 Just slightly dumber. 1.00

02:27:29.000 Like one millionth of one percent dumber. 1.00

02:27:32.000 Oh, we're running out of time? 1.00

02:27:33.000 Just let's show them that and we'll end with stupidity. 1.00

02:27:35.000 Listen, man, you're a brilliant person. 0.99

02:27:37.000 Thank you very much for not just being here, but for what you do.

02:27:41.000 Even Mrs. Rogan was excited that you were on the podcast today.

02:27:44.000 Well, thank you.

02:27:45.000 She's not big on science.

02:27:46.000 As you can tell, she wants real diamonds.

02:27:49.000 Next time I'll smuggle one out under blindfold for her. 0.95

02:27:52.000 I'll see what I can do.

02:27:55.000 Your passion for knowledge and your passion for distributing it.

02:27:59.000 It's so infectious and it's so fascinating.

02:28:01.000 I got a lot of Twitter messages today about you coming on.

02:28:04.000 A lot of them were from people who said that you ignited their passion for science and you made them pursue specific career goals.

02:28:14.000 There was a guy today who sent me this message about He's an engineer.

02:28:17.000 I became an engineer because of listening to you.

02:28:19.000 Well, I'm deeply appreciative of that, but let me pose that and let me analyze that in a slightly different way.

02:28:25.000 I already know that the universe is an extraordinary place, but not everyone else does.

02:28:31.000 So part of what I do is serve as a conduit between the curiosity in our culture that is embedded there even if you've forgotten it, because I know it's within us all, because it's there in all of us when we're children, AKA, 1.00

02:28:47.000 you're a bad motherfucker. 1.00

02:28:48.000 No, no. 1.00

02:28:48.000 That's what I'm trying to say. 1.00

02:28:49.000 All I do is park the curtains...

02:28:52.000 For people to recognize the awesomeness of the universe that is there with or without me.

02:29:00.000 Well, you have a beautiful way of looking at it.

02:29:01.000 And I really appreciate your humility in that respect.

02:29:05.000 But that perfect storm of personality and knowledge is very rare.

02:29:09.000 And I just appreciate you for being who you are.

02:29:12.000 And I thank you very much for being on this podcast.

02:29:14.000 And can I just say, you know why I'm in LA now?

02:29:16.000 Because we're beginning to shoot.

02:29:19.000 Oh, thanks.

02:29:19.000 With applause in the corner.

02:29:21.000 We are creating the next generation Cosmos.

02:29:26.000 Cosmos for the 21st century.

02:29:27.000 The Carl Sagan...

02:29:29.000 I've watched them all.

02:29:30.000 A hundred times over.

02:29:31.000 But that was from 1980. It's been 33 years.

02:29:36.000 So we're doing it now.

02:29:37.000 It's going to be another...

02:29:37.000 It's 13 episodes.

02:29:39.000 It's Cosmos, a space-time odyssey.

02:29:41.000 Is it PBS as well?

02:29:42.000 No, it's not PBS. It'll have a hugely larger market exposure because it's going to appear...

02:29:47.000 Likely in primetime, but we're not sure of that yet, but it's going to air on Fox. 0.99

02:29:51.000 Holy shit! 0.99

02:29:52.000 Fox! 1.00

02:29:54.000 Strong!

02:29:54.000 That's amazing.

02:29:56.000 God, that's going to be so good.

02:29:57.000 We've got Seth MacFarlane, who's our sort of broker.

02:30:00.000 He brought us to Fox, and I became latter-day friends with him.

02:30:04.000 He's a fan of Cosmos, and he loves Carl Sagan.

02:30:06.000 He's a fan of my work.

02:30:07.000 He's a fan of weed, too.

02:30:09.000 You ever talk to that guy?

02:30:11.000 Loves the weed.

02:30:12.000 Powerful Seth MacFarlane.

02:30:13.000 Is that what accounts for those conversations I've had with him?

02:30:16.000 Perhaps.

02:30:16.000 That's what accounts for those conversations you've had with me.

02:30:18.000 Smoking aliens.

02:30:20.000 He came to me, Neil, I've got to talk to you.

02:30:21.000 I said, let's have lunch.

02:30:22.000 We have lunch.

02:30:22.000 He asked me all these questions about the Big Bang and the cosmic microwave background and the early universe.

02:30:28.000 And I said, okay, you're good now?

02:30:30.000 He said, yeah, I'm good.

02:30:31.000 And then three months later, there was an episode where Stewie went back to the Big Bang, and I get a full card credit at the end as science advisor.

02:30:39.000 Oh, that's amazing.

02:30:40.000 No, I was like lunchtime entertainment forum, and it was like the science advisor episodes.

02:30:45.000 One of the greatest things about creating this podcast has been the opportunity to have these kind of conversations.

02:30:49.000 I 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. 0.97

02:30:56.000 He'd be like, yeah, tell that dude I got shit to do. 0.95

02:30:59.000 But the fact that I could pick your brain for this long. 0.98

02:31:01.000 Well, the fact that you even have this curiosity and you've nurtured it in your fan base is great.

02:31:06.000 So great to be on your show.

02:31:08.000 Thank you, sir.

02:31:08.000 I really, really appreciate it.

02:31:09.000 And you can follow Neil on Twitter.

02:31:11.000 It's N-E-I-L Tyson on Twitter. 0.98

02:31:14.000 And follow him, you fucks, and show him some love, please. 1.00

02:31:19.000 Thank you very much for being here. 0.96

02:31:20.000 Thanks, everybody, for all the messages on Twitter and Facebook and all the various comedy shows.

02:31:26.000 Speaking of which, this weekend, this Friday night, two shows here at the Ice House in Pasadena, 8.30 and 10.30 with Ari Shafir.

02:31:35.000 Are you coming?

02:31:36.000 You want to...

02:31:36.000 You want it?

02:31:37.000 I might not be around. 1.00

02:31:38.000 Brian might have some pussy lined up. 1.00

02:31:41.000 That's what I heard! 1.00

02:31:42.000 But me and Ari will be there, and we'll probably have some other local guys, whoever's in town.

02:31:46.000 I think Callan's in town.

02:31:47.000 I'll get him to come by.

02:31:48.000 But we're here. 0.99

02:31:50.000 We're going to have a good fucking time. 0.98

02:31:51.000 Thank you very much for coming. 0.99

02:31:53.000 Bye!

02:31:53.000 And watching our podcast.

02:31:55.000 Thanks to Onnit for sponsoring it.

02:31:57.000 Go to O-N-N-I-T. Use the code name ROGAN and save yourself 10% off any and all supplements.

02:32:03.000 Also, thanks to DeathSquad.TV, the Brian Red Band Empire.

02:32:08.000 And go there and you can buy one of those cool cat t-shirts.

02:32:12.000 And you can also find out what podcast he has and when they're going to be there and what shows they have coming up as well.

02:32:18.000 Always great comics.

02:32:19.000 Great...

02:32:19.000 A lot of, like...

02:32:21.000 Previously unknown local guys that Brian gives a shot at big exposure.

02:32:27.000 And really good comics.

02:32:29.000 And tonight, after this podcast is over, he has one of my favorite podcasts on the internet today.

02:32:35.000 It's Pointless with Kevin Pereira.

02:32:37.000 And that will be also available only on Death Squad on iTunes.

02:32:41.000 And who's the guest today?

02:32:43.000 We got Mike.

02:32:47.000 Hey, Kevin Pereira is here, ladies and gentlemen. 0.99

02:32:51.000 Science, bitches! 1.00

02:32:52.000 Alright, this podcast is over. 1.00

02:32:54.000 Go fuck yourself. 1.00

02:32:55.000 We'll see you soon. 1.00

02:32:56.000 We love the shit out of ya. 0.84

02:32:57.000 Love you more than you love yourself. 1.00

02:32:59.000 In the multiverse, bitches! 1.00

The Joe Rogan Experience - January 09, 2013

Joe Rogan Experience #310 - Neil Degrasse Tyson

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Summary

Transcript