Best of Neil deGrasse Tyson Amazing Arguments And Clever Comebacks Part 2

that the ingredients if you had asked your chemistry teacher 50 years ago once you looked at that mysterious chart of boxes that sat in front of your class the periodic table of elements where did those elements come from the chemistry teacher would actually not have an answer for you let's say we dig them out of the earth that's not where they come from it took modern astrophysics to determine the origin of the chemical elements we observe stars we know what goes on in their center they explode laying bare their contents and what we have discovered is that the elements of the periodic table that which we are made of derive from the actions of stars that have manufactured the elements exploded scatter their enriched guts across the galaxy contaminating or enriching gas clouds that then form a next generation of stars populated by planets and possibly life and so when you look at the ingredients of the universe the number one ingredient is hydrogen next is helium next is carbon sorry hydrogen helium oxygen carbon nitrogen those are the top ingredients in the universe they say well okay that's kind of cool well and you look at earth because we like thinking of ourselves as special we say oh we're special but what are we made of what's the number one sort of molecule in the body its water without its water oh it's water made of h2o hydrogen and oxygen hmm are you an oxygen in fact if you rank the elements in the human body with the exception of helium which is chemically inert useless to you for any reason other than just to inhale it and sound like me Mickey Mouse you can't die from helium unless that's all you breathe so number one in the human body is hydrogen matches the universe number two is oxygen matches the universe number three carbon matches the universe number four nitrogen matches the universe and for each of us the fifth element other is the same in both places okay other so we learned in the last 50 years that of course not only do we exist in this universe it is the universe itself that exists within us and had we been made of some rare isotope of bismuth you would have arguments hey we're something special but there are people who are upset by that fact saying well that would I mean we're not special well I think it's special in another kind of way because when you look up at the night sky it's no longer we're here that's there it's that we are part of that and that association for me is actually quite enlightening and ennobling and enriching in fact it's almost spiritual looking up at the night sky and finding a sense of belonging given what we've learned about the night sky and so so now we have ourselves though are we alone in the universe we're made of the most common ingredients there are and our chemistry is based on carbon carbon is the most chemically active ingredient in the entire periodic table if you were to find a chemistry on which to base something really complex called life you would base it on carbon carbon is like the fourth most abundant ingredient in the universe no rain you can make more molecules out of carbon than you can all other kinds of molecules combined so if we ask ourselves are we alone in the universe would be in spite of my diatribe about UFOs I tell you in the same breath that it would be inexcusably egocentric to suggest that we are alone in the cosmic the chemistry is to which to declare that the universe too vast there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand in all the beaches of the world there are more stars in the universe than all the sounds and words ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived to say we're alone in the universe no we haven't found life outside of Earth yet we're looking haven't looked very far yet galaxies this big we looked about that far but we're looking and how about life on Earth how is it hard to form just because we don't know how to do it in the lab doesn't mean Nature had problems so it may be given that information that given the right ingredients which are everywhere life may be inevitable an inevitable consequence of complex chemistry if that's the case we look around our own solar system we look at Mars all the evidence suggests that Mars was once a wet fertile place in Oasis they're dried riverbeds and floodplains and river deltas and meandering River it's all bone-dry now something bad happened on Mars so knobs got turned in its environment that left it the way it is right now some bad knobs got turned on Venus to runaway greenhouse effect you saw the clip on that 900 degrees Fahrenheit on Venus some knobs not tearing there - people say why just their money up there when we spend on it because up there we might learn about down here ok I don't want to runaway greenhouse effect here Venus is the best example in this whole system of a planet gone bad let's learn about that first so it turns out more we learn that asteroid impacts when they hit can cast rocks in their surrounding areas into space with escape velocity so they never come back to the planet from which it was launched if Mars was wet and firmly before Earth was as all evidence suggests and if Mars had life before Earth had life it is possible for there to have been bacterial stowaways in the nooks and crannies of the rocks that were cast into space there's some Hardy bacteria that we already know exists on earth survives extreme temperatures pressures freeze-dried reconstituted radiation the hostile environment of space would be nothing to some of these bacteria it may be that life on Earth was seeded by bacterial stowaways on rocks that were cast free from Mars this is a plausible scenario that's called panspermia the transference of life from one planet to the next if that's the case that makes all of us descendants of Martians that want to alert you in advance now let me give you a disturbing thought a fascinatingly disturbing thought and we'll leave you on that know if you look at our closest genetic relative to human beings would be the chimpanzee where we share like 98 plus percent identical DNA we are smarter than a chimpanzee so let's invent a measure of intelligence that make humans unique let's say intelligence is your ability to like compose poetry symphonies do our math and science let's say okay listen make that as the arbitrary definition of intelligence for the moment chibs can't do any of that yet we share 98 99 percent identical DNA okay the most brilliant chimp there ever was maybe can do a little bit of sign language well our toddlers can do that toddler's so here's what concerns me deeply deeply everything that we are that distinguishes us from chimps emerges from that 1% difference in DNA - - because that's the difference the Hubble telescope these grand that's in that 1% maybe everything that we are that is not the chimp is not as smart compared to the chimp as we tell ourselves it is maybe the difference between constructing and launching a Hubble telescope and it symptom beining to finger motions as sign language maybe that difference is not all that great we tell ourselves it is just the same way we label our books optical illusions we tell ourselves it's a lot maybe it's almost nothing how would we decide that imagine another life-form that's 1% different from us in the direction that we are different from the chimp think about that we have 1% difference and we're building the Hubble telescope go one go another 1% who what are we today we would be drooling blithering idiots in their presence that's what we would be we would that they would take Stephen Hawking and roll them in front of their their primate researchers and say well this one is like the most brilliant among them because he can do sort of astrophysics in his head Oh hasn't that cute little Johnny can do that too Oh in fact Johnny just like that let me get it it's it's it's on the refrigerator door here he is he did it in his elementary school class think about how smart they would be quantum mechanics would be intuitive to their toddlers whole symphonies would be written by their children and like I said just put up on the refrigerator door the way our pasta collages are on our refrigerator doors so the notion that we're going to find some intelligent life and have a conversation with it well the last time you stopped to have a conversation with a worm or bird although you might have had a conversation but I don't think you expected an answer all right so we don't have conversations with any other species on earth with whom we have DNA in common to believe that some intelligent other species is going to be interested in us enough to have a conversation they'll look at our Hubble telescope us and others in that quaint liquor right there doing so I lay awake at nights wondering whether simply we as a species are simply too stupid to figure out the universe that we're investigating and maybe we need some other species 1% 1% smarter than we are for which strength theory would be intuitive for which all the greatest mysteries of the universe from dark matter dark energy the origins of life and all the frontiers of our thought would be something that they would just self into it I'm jealous of that possibility because I want to be around for those discoveries thank you all if NASA weren't around what would happen to our universe well I can tell you this if NASA weren't here we would know a lot less about the universe and we would be intellectually impoverished by that fact because I enjoy knowing where we are where we came from and where we're going and those questions are answered from space to know how Earth got here how the Sun got here what the future of Earth will be what the future of our Sun will be what we need to leave earth and find another planet all of that comes to us from the discoveries of a space program much of those discoveries have come from NASA so it's not that the universe would be different if NASA never existed it's that we would be different in a way that I don't even want to think about so we wouldn't sell we wouldn't know a single thing about the universe yeah we would be we wouldn't know a single thing about the universe we just be rummaging on Earth's surface thinking that our solutions to all our problems come from looking down rather than from looking up you know I'd be embarrassed to show an alien that we kill each other to extract energy sources beneath the sands when the universe is full of limitless amounts of star light and by the way someone was reading my tweets someone asked when I compose my tweets am i high you know so it was fair one time I like I was distracted by a doily and I was I was concerned that not enough people paused to reflect on the beauty and majesty of a doily right just think about what a doily is and it's just to sit under your cup and so I got a tweet some about that yeah hang on a sec let me do this just be a moment that's right because I'd already start so so my response will be to those who ask am i high knowing that the sky sits the sky sits above the entire Earth that should tell you that the study of the universe is itself a state of natural high tweet ok polian if you visited his library it's not just sort of books of world history and battles it's engineering books it's physics books this man wanted to know where his cannonballs would land all right it was much more than just sort of a lucky general he was into the physics the engineering and the material science of war and so immediately summoned up the five volume production of Laplace read it through cover-to-cover called in Laplace and said sir I have the exact quote here hang on I should know Pulliam asked him what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens this is kind of like that's what Newton would ask right Laplace replies sir I had no need for that hypothesis and so what concerns me now is even if you're as brilliant as Newton you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops it just stops you're kind of no good anymore for advancing that frontier waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn't have God on the brain and who says that's a really cool problem I want to solve it they come in and solve it but look at the time delay this was a hundred year time delay and the math that's in perturbation theory is like crumbs for Newton he could have come up with that the guy invented calculus just on a dare practically when someone asked him what what you know you know Ike how come planets orbit in ellipses and not some other shape and he couldn't answer that he goes home for two months comes back out comes integral differential calculus because he needed that to answer that court to answer that question and so so this is this is the kind of mind we were dealing with with Newton he could have gone there but he didn't he didn't his religiosity stopped him and so we're left with the realization of course that intelligent design while real in the history of science while real in the presence of sort of philosophical drivers is nonetheless a philosophy of ignorance and so regardless of what our political agendas all you have to say is science is a philosophy of discovery intelligent is eyes a philosophy of ignorance that's all I don't need to see well I don't need have you discovered anything lately if not get out of the science classroom but I'm not going to say don't teach this because if it's real it happened so I don't want people to sweep it under the rug because if you do you're neglecting something fundamental it's going on in people's minds when they confront things they don't understand and it happens to the greatest of the minds as it happens to everyone else many if not most other people in the public yeah that's a better music here the face on Mars not at the time so everybody got excited well sorry not everybody those people who were sure that life on Mars had a simian face okay I mean think about it most life on Earth does not have a simian face most life on Earth doesn't have a face all right so so life with which we have DNA in common all life on Earth has DNA in common I'm going to go to another planet and it has a face the only the only things on earth that have faces are like vertebrates have faces that's a vertebrate face so you want to say that there are vertebrates on Mars and there's simian in their biology well there's only one thing that looks like a face no matter the camera angle and what is that a face yes so we go back at another time and this is what it is at another time with higher resolution it looks less like a face you can kind of see how it might have been now all the Mars fanatics said oh the Martians figured out we were looking at them and they quickly covered up the monument then you go back again and it's like even less like a face so the Martians are continued to cover this up apparently so more on that later but in fact I do have the first evidence from the Rovers this photo in fact has been kept from the public till I have special connections to NASA as you heard in the introduction so this one was the first image taken by the Rovers and it's been suppressed by NASA ever since right so I thought I'd share it with you guys like you know you're my people tonight here by the way if you're looking on Mars for faces why not look for other things that are familiar you know you only see that as a face because we have a face and you familiar things or what you pick out even if they're not really there right when you look up in the clouds you don't say oh I see a lobster no has anyone ever said they see Lobster and no you say I see Abe Lincoln or George wash you're looking at sort of familiar iconography of our culture and so let's find some more familiar iconography in the Martian terrain there's the Valentine crater there you go we got one of those how about the smiley face crater right so if you look hard enough you can find stuff and call it whatever you want you you

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Keywords: Neil DeGrasse Tyson (Organization Leader), Moments, best, arguments, and, comebacks, part, Best, of, clever, Amazing, Atheism (Religion), Atheist (Religion), Antitheism (Literature Subject), Religion, Debate, Philosophy, Science, great, nice, answer, anti-theist, anti, theist, intelligent, bright, smart, church, morality, god, humanism, free will, theism, Christianity (Religion), Argument, Islam (Religion), Space, NASA (Spacecraft Manufacturer), blackhole, earth, Darwin, two

Id: _iiKi0FjjUw

Length: 21min 12sec (1272 seconds)

Published: Sat May 09 2015