Neil deGrasse Tyson – StarTalk Live at New York Comic Con 2019

[Music] 2019 New York comic-con we're back Startalk all right we're gonna do some comic-con stuff tonight I promise you that this theme for this evening is the science of pop fiction and we have two scientists myself included and from the start talks table of experts we have our resident geek in chief I'll introduce him in just a moment but first let me get my clothes Chuck nice Chuck come on out here love you man let me do that all right Chuck nice go take a seat and next up we have a friend and colleague he's an astrophysicist at the CUNY system based in Staten Island come on up Charles Lou Charles was that about I'm just so excited to be a comic-con New York comic-con is the best it really really is yeah all right comic-con rocks man so so we've got three segments the first one will be devoted to the topic of fictional elements that even mean well Mike antimony arsenic and blue M&M selenium the hydrogen oxygen nitrogen and rhenium those are real elements oh yeah we talk about fictional elements win anything so what role do fictional elements play in the world of comics fundamentally of course there are only a certain number of elements like eating if you count the ones that we have been able to create in the laboratory 100 hundred twenty hundred and twenty something right but we always finish everything in the universe is made of one hundred and twenty things right yeah but we always have to have something that makes someone be able to fly or stretch or run really fast so it's got to be an element of some kind right really they're compounds most likely there might be a Lloyd's they might be metals but don't worry elements are good but in the comic books think generally whatever they are they're not common they're rare yes and they have special properties like I said that they want that's usually they're strong in some kind of way yes okay so one of the early one of these is Thor's hammer how you pronounce that you have to say it like you're taking a dump is that part of it I'd rather like to think of it as the Norse Norwegian stately godlike Asgardian oh now that was convenient so it's an Asgardian dump okay okay so who is a fictional element they don't have a lot of and what about Simon Asgard Wolverines claws what are those adamantium antium another element and Wonder Woman's bracelets feminine feminum feminine okay that sounds malformed because elements should end and I um except for aluminum all the others are I um feminism that should be FEM Minear well maybe if you're in Britain right cuz you pronounce them aluminium so this is feminine iam Ezreal on this welfare many amounts so much better than what to call feminine feminine feminine there from Paradise Island what do they care how we pronounce it true I'm just saying you know feminine sounds like something that you would use to you know get rid of like male toxicity you know we decide ladies is your man in a hall well the feminine so would be like a perfume you could either spray it on or give it to him in a pill you know and I mean try new feminine well the term feminum came originally from a two-part episode called The Feminine Mystique in the original Wonder Woman television series of 1976 and 1977 damn featuring a young 20 year-old Debra Winger three-time Academy Award nominee as Wonder Girl wonderful sila yes Diana Prince's fictional younger teenage sister well Academy Award or Emmy Award nominee she was nominated for three Academy Awards Lynda Carter regrettably has not yet been nominated for an awesome man let me tell you something if I didn't know and love you as much as I do I would think you would have an unhealthy obsession with Wonder Woman given what he knows about guilty as charged also so tell me more about the bracelets what okay theoretically the bracelets were originally a symbol from the ancient Greek days this is based on the Wonder Woman sort of creation anthology back in the 1930s and 40s she's Amazon yeah she's Amazon but these bracelets were a symbol that they were subservient to men that they had been captured by men they were enslaved by men but what happened was when Paradise Island was a and broke free Aphrodite the goddess of love made them indestructible and a symbol of the great abilities and powers of women specifically those Amazons on Amazon so turn it back I back on it's on its head that's right right and so what happened was that now they are bulletproof and they were able to deflect bullets and if you're skilled enough you can block weaponry and so forth and the pilot of the original Wonder Woman TV series which I still can't find on reruns anymore if any of you have a copy let me know where I can get one there's a scene where she is trying to make money because money was not something she was used to and she got on a stage and she was knocking away bullets people were shooting with hand and there's some little old lady brings out like a tommy gun like a submachine gun and starts blasting I can't find it anymore a little old lady is trying to kill Wonder Woman yes the Tommy what they submachine gun yeah what the hell what the episode was at the pilot the first two-hour series one yeah and you wonder why they bought it please I mean I would have been the first lady yes picked up a tommy gun to kill Wonder Woman well not so much to kill but yes to kill she she was a Nazi agent and the whole point was that she's a Nazi grandma remember that the original Wonder Woman series was set in right or to historical fiction so what happened was that this character okay Wonder Woman Lynda Carter needed to make money and so she was a stage personality a impresario like spider on stage right so that she could like demonstrate people paid tickets bought bought tickets paid money so that she could stop bracelets and have them watch it and then some old lady came up said I'd like to try and she came up and she had a you know violin case and she opens it up and it's a before you know and it was like well we do this and and and then she's oh he can't do that signal and then one woman says she's not afraid oh right and she goes up and I still can't find it good they're all that's you because I don't know what would become of you if you found that I have a bit of physics observation to share that only came to me in this moment oh yeah it's not good enough for the bracelets to be bulletproof you have to be faster than the bullet to put the bracelet in the way of the bullet to block it right if you're that fast you could just step a step to the side yes right yes I'm just thinking there there are two good reasons that you know well first you kill Pluto really why stand in the middle go sweet you'll pull a matrix thing on it and do one of these there are two good reasons not to dodge although you can do that yes one is that you protect the people behind you but not the people on the side and that was the second point just like in but see the Phantom Menace it was right when it was first introduced that you could use your lightsaber to deflect blaster shots and use them as weapons against the people that are firing against you one by and I'll use those bracelets to attack in defense of the Jedi when they use a lightsaber they don't just deflect it they send it back to where it came from thereby rendering the shooter Wonder Woman is that what he just said will you paying attention 14 seconds ago I have a very sort of - but and one other bit of physics about blocking bullets handguns wouldn't but a rifle shot is actually supersonic typically so if it's the bullets moving supersonically your hands would have to be moving supersonic Lee as well to intersect them typically so so each hand would leave a little sonic boom behind and so and that they didn't do that so well they missed an opportunity that's true yeah real science all but also keep sure they're losing sleep right we gotta move on Chuck Charles tell people why metals are generally strong things because so many of these fictional elements are metals of some kind that's true so what is going on inside the atom and whatever lattice it's in that makes them strong relative to rocks or anything else well that's a complicated question of course right almonds easy it's the answer you're saying it's complicated so good right easy question real science makes it very hard right metals are essentially you think of them as many many atoms that together work together to form like one atomic like structure that's why for example they conduct electricity really well they do those kinds of things in general but within metals there's a lot of variation right and that's why alloys are very important so for example copper and tin are both very soft if you actually hat in a tin foil right we use aluminum these days but copper and tin are very soft but if you can smelt them together then you create bronze which is actually very hard and so the whole concept of the Bronze Age right where for more than a millennium of human history it the fates of entire civilizations and cultures were determined by whether or not you could get tin and copper together to make bronze was all about whether or not you pneumatology well enough and the Hittites were very important also in smelting iron metallurgy yeah metallurgy metallurgy metallurgy okay oh I see where we're going with this okay I'm just trying to I didn't know what you said so I have to like translate it yeah metallic metallurgy metallurgy metallurgy like I said yeah I stand corrected okay Metallica [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] okay so so tell me about an Iron Man he's got oh no he's got palladium in there what is that okay all right there could be some very serious Iron Man fans out there yes it did not like that react see and together now no no it Iran is cool I have no problem with Iron Man it's the Palladium part okay okay you see complain him is one of the elements on the periodic wires a little bit of history okay back in the 1960s when Iron Man was first created the suit acted like a defibrillator or a heart helper because he had that shrapnel in his heart so it was none this arc whatever right but actually he occasionally would actually have to sit down in some room and plug in his armor chest plate like into the wall in order forget to get recharged enough to keep his heart beating that is awesome yeah that was in the 60s in the 80s Marvel Universe this is based on the Marvel Handbook of the 1980s officially his armor was solar-powered he actually had perfected an industrial strategy where you could put like little mini microbes sized solar panel chips into the armor which allowed him to charge from the Sun and allowed him to have a super power that way that's brilliant yeah it was really cool right but now there's palladium and the reason that came about was in 1989 two scientists in America claimed based on their experiments that they had developed cold fusion through palladium you remember this Neil I remember and the stock price went through the right it did palladium futures went crazy but what happened was they were trying to do these what we now call just so cold fusion normal fusion takes millions of degrees to slam nuclei together which are positively charged you want to overcome their electrical repulsion because positive rejects positive right they opposites attract but positive that the sames repelled so right if you can do this on a tabletop without requiring a million degrees then you can produce energy but not having anything start out to be hot at all well the claim was palladium was one of these ingredients like that's right hans bethe in the 1930s who won the Nobel Prize for this figured out that you could do nuclear fusion when he got so hot not because it was so hot that it could overcome the electromagnetic pulsing but you could create the environment for something called a quantum tunneling reaction that would allow two protons to come together and become a deuterium nucleus now what happened was that the I think sucker wrote bonzai he tunnels through the mountain doesn't it in his car yeah do we agree on that yes yes yes absolutely yeah but what happened was it the Palladium folks thought that they could create this quantum tunneling effect in palladium at room temperature okay we're close to room temperature instead of having to go to millions of degrees and so they thought they did it sort of palladium 107 becomes palladium 103 plus a helium 4 plus a little bit of extra energy or something for the next five years huge amounts of time and energy and money were invested in trying to reproduce that experiment and it never worked so finally by the mid 90s people decided that this really wasn't mainstream this was just an unfortunate or an accident or something that they did these two dudes own I do not know but the answer is there are still plenty of people in the world today who think that there might still be something to that cold fusion thing nowadays we call that low-energy fusion reactions or something lef our research and so that's why palladium still holds a little bit of interest in the sort of fictional world of trying to create power something from nothing so so let's go straight to particle accelerators if you want to make them if you're gonna make an element that you don't happen to have handy so what do we do we take an atom and we bombard it with lots and lots of neutrons okay and in the proper circumstance one of those neutrons will stick or a few of them will stick and then you create an environment where the new element is born because neutrons will transform into protons through specific processes having to do with the weak nuclear force alright so and so basically in Princeton we can make any any element we want so the whole dream of alchemy is real today it is absolutely real is just not economical yeah right we could make gold out of lead but it's cheaper to to go buy it at the corner gold shop and right yes and I will mention that to this day astronomers we think that the best manufacturing of elements comes from stars when for example a star goes supernova the elements surrounding it are bombarded with so many neutrons sometimes thousands of neutrons per second that there are possibly quantum tunneling reactions that can happen that will create elements with atomic numbers in the 150s even in the 200s only they don't stay around in our universe for very long they decay almost immediately so let's go on to Thor's hammer guru okay again he's still constipated yes without hammer huh so I just want to say that when I saw the Thor movie the one that has Natalie Portman playing an astrophysicist you say that like you're angry about it no no I just letting people know that my people my profession shows up in movies I'm just saying right on really there was an astrophysicist in Top Gun Kelly McGillis Telemachus was an astrophysicist I don't know why because she was an expert in the f-14 planes well none of us are but she was an astrophysics I'm just saying but you know a listen danger zone a Nicholas Cage was an astrophysicist in the movie knowing in the movie knowing okay it really should have been called not knowing actually if you saw the plot but but so we out there so anyone I'm watching the movie and I'm thinking I wonder how heavy the hammer is and there's a scene where his father talks about about linear in the name of the hammer right and says that there it is forged in the heart of a dying star listen I got this it's made it a dying star we we know dying stopway astrophysics people so I went home densities of the densest dying Tsar so I got a pulsar dense packed with neutrons and I said I'm gonna make Thor's hammer out of neutrons so I got a replica of his hammer measured the volume figured out how many neutrons you could fit in it and then I tweeted how much that hammer would weigh and I said if Thor's hammer is made of neutron star material as implied by legend it would weigh the equivalent of a herd of 300 million elephants yeah and and that's all know if you take the hammer like that and you dropped it it would fall through the earth as if it were not there cut all the way through the center of the earth come out the other side and then come back and oscillate back and forth ripping out the interior guts of the earth as we rotated it would not be cool so then you must know that what I'm about to say is true wherever you think you are in the geek spectrum wherever you well if you think you're at the top there is someone at comic-con who knows more about it than you do okay no matter who you are it is like a semi infinite continuum of expertise and that's why I love comic-con with Larry six hours yes just a terrific place within 36 hours someone tweeted back okay dr. Tyson you were wrong about Thor's hammer its 356 million and so I was apparently really wrong really wrong yes so apparently they cited a Marvel Comics trading card from the 1990s that said Milner is made out of fictional material guru and it weighs exactly 6.2 pounds [Laughter] 6.2 pounds and so I'm saying I like my answer better yeah but your hammer you can't use it to actually do anything well accept me more quick good well I'm not done wait so so okay so I mentioned this one time it had a like a super fan in the front row and it said 6.2 founds did they say on which planet it weighs six point two [Applause] yes we are not working you can find the planet where the 6.2 hammer weighs 300 billion elephants and then hgtv tweeted is it a ball-peen hammer or is it [Laughter] just saying what can you build so here's the problem I thought it was made out of neutron star material okay but that's not what he said in the movie he said it's made in a neutron star in the in the field of a dying star and then they capture that in the Infinity the guy that's right infinity words that's the whole contraption right there you go they use the power of the neutron star to forge the yeah so let me end this first segment tell us about vibranium vibranium yeah [Laughter] [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] vibranium was introduced in Fantastic Four number 52 which came out no this is the wrong audience to make that stuff that is so true yeah alright it's a thing okay go 52 I own Fantastic Four number 52 that's why I know what does it do it's a beat-up gold copy it smells all more what if I this is gamma Con okay this is Comic Con don't you share the love of a beat-up old 1965 comic book thank you hey telly tell me about the properties of vibranium originally when it was designed vibranium was just able to absorb any kinetic energy in other words it just magically dissipated so any impact on vibranium made it as if it were never there that made it like Kevlar yes but better okay I mean so good right and in fact the Super Society of Wakanda which again was introduced in this time in 1965 I mean Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were so ahead of their time right this super society in the middle of arc Africa but but at that time the black panther was not spiritual in the sensitive now that he has like the powers of the ancestors and so forth he was just so well trained right and so smart that he was a superhero and he had great technology and he was really talented that way but he had problems with this guy named Irving Klaw who had killed his father in a much more elegant way than they was done in the movies while though was okay in the movies too I guess am i right that the movie Black Panther had two hobbits in it hobbits yeah you mean from middle-earth yeah I might think I'm right there I missed them yes okay the actors who played hobbits [Laughter] that's different okay they're taking the hobbits to Isengard am so vibranium later on was actually mixed into Captain America's shield from the 1980s so it was a mixture an alloy of vibranium and adamantium which made it even stronger than pure adamantium which is what Wolverines claws are made of an Ultron's body etc as you well know so modern modern vibranium as done in the Marvel Cinematic Universe right at the very beginning it's claimed as the world's hardest metal right the world's strongest metal it turns out that the strength of it is completely secondary to this amazing ability for it to absorb kinetic energy that's what made it special so vibranium is cool but it was not because it's hard but because it's literally soft power the ability to take whatever it gets and be able to spread it out and produce this both marvelous technology and also incredible weapons of war but what if that in a black man I don't know what is right so so it doesn't only absorb it it keeps the energy and you can do things with that energetic playback oh evidence to the movie energy storage device yes ok very cool is there anything on earth that we know of that actually can mimic that in some way in any way the storage battery yes that can take that's all we with that can take kinetic energy turn it into potential energy and then put it back out yeah yeah rubber ball right you know what man you ain't have to be a hole about you know I'm just saying I'm gonna end the first segment on the a-hole comment you are participating in star talk live New York I'm God [Applause] we are back New York comic-con 2019 Chuck nice co-host thank you sir leading at Chuck nice comet Chuck nice calm excellent a Charles Liu hello do you tweet that Chuck lu CH uck I'll try you so you're both Chuck's well yeah but he's the real Chuck no no no we're both jocks yes yes we're like two chucks okay that's how many Joseph I was gonna do it in a second you know but this is how many Chuck's it takes to chuck that would sir all right so let's talk about how you get around the universe God talk about how you get around the universe and the technologies that empowered it so we've got obviously the warp drive oh yeah and so just just to put some reference frame here if in Star Trek they did not have warp drives and they were constrained to just the speeds that we currently achieve with our fastest Rockets these are the ones that don't even have people on right the fastest Rockets it would take them a hundred thousand years to get from our solar system to the nearest star system about a hundred thousand years which greatly exceeds the life expectancy of human physiology unless you travel almost the speed of light in which case everyone else would die but you'd be just fine so that's enough time so start date so what is 4372 everyone on earth is dead [Laughter] [Applause] how is it that in the series he's 50 years old but had the body of a 25 year old speaks with a British accent but had a French name what's that what is that that is the beauty of jean-luc baby no no today we would call that cultural appropriation no no if you do it respectfully and if everybody is together in peace and harmony like they are in the 24th century I don't consider appropriate okay that's a that's a fourth century we'll find out yeah what is war what is going on what drive in a warp speed most of you in there probably know better than we do but basically the dilithium crystals create a reaction through the warp nacelles which creates a warp bubble which allows the object within the bubble to travel through what's called subspace which is a sort of a higher dimensional construct let our spacetime lives in allowing us to travel from one point in our space to another point in our space faster than light would be able to travel that same speed but you're not really traveling faster than light you're within this little warp shell that's the authenticity authenticity the science of Star Trek right yes the only problem is of course then you have to be able to communicate in subspace sub saves communications presumably if you're sending a radio signal that's traveling at the speed of light and if you're traveling faster than the speed of light you get there before heuchera tells you there are Klingons on the starboard bow that doesn't work so well so they had to create this subspace communication thing too that would get there faster than they've mastered right so there's less you beat the signal and what good is that exactly so that's not talked about very much but it's a big no it's not a trap okay so how would you contrast Star Trek faster than light travel to star wars vessel oh yeah making you do that you're not Bo on okay Star Wars one is number one the other is number two maybe number seven the situation with Star Wars travel right the the overall Star Wars Lightspeed jumps and so forth unfortunately there's a lot of inconsistency in how Star Wars moves from place to place you think Star Trek purposefully made this warp bubble thing to make things as causally reasonable as possible for Star Wars I think they just punted it's really hard to imagine a way where you can for example fire a planet killer for example in one solar system to send it all the way to another solar system instantaneously pass a third solar system as you're watching it go by in the sky and then destroy five planets in a fourth solar system right it's just I mean how are you getting there that's fact people complain when I talk about movies that way oh yeah I mean I'm sorry and and look we are not even gonna talk about the Kessel run okay don't get me started not hold me back even gonna talk about the Kessel run they make a mistake calling time a distance and then they double down on it in sequels Wow okay the coastal run in 30 part how many perhaps around 12 parsecs oh my god really are under 12 so is 11 points under under 12 under 12 are 12 hundred 12 parsecs which is a unit of distance yes I'm angry that let's skip this no I'm not even gonna I'm old enough because I'm older than both y'all two remember seeing Star Wars in first-run episode one which became episode four yes when he jumped to Lightspeed that was freaking awesome yeah no one had done that and you had the blur of the stars like whoa and then when the first Star Trek movie came out then they just copied that because they didn't do that in the series that's right okay oh they did better than that they wound up with the wormhole just a visual effect so I give him that's a very good note the only other scientific fact I'm gonna give Star Wars what the Luke sees the double sunset because we know astrophysically that more than half the stars you see in the night sky contain at least two stars in orbit around each other neuroticism some are triple star systems some are even more and that was never portrayed in fiction but you know the problem with tattooing double star system if you take the geometry of the sunset and where those stars were the temperature that they probably do good Tatooine and so forth and you watch the planetary orbit and what a bad orbit would have been unstable yeah tell you something it's so funny when I was watching that scene I thought the way that's sustainable gravity no it's not no no but Charles I thought about that and I thought that they look close enough in the sky so that that planet's orbit would be sufficiently far that it wouldn't go into a chaotic spiral out of control I'm gonna tell you right now if George Lucas were here he would kick you both in the testes but it was beautiful and in fact there was an Astrophysical Journal article written around 2005 or so called two suns in the sky and that was an early attempt to do a census of stars and exoplanets that had a very very good page no triple stars quadruple stars yeah they exist their planet you just have to be orbiting really far away otherwise as you orbit your gravitational allegience continually changes yeah depending on which star you're closest to at any given point and that can wreak havoc not only on the stability of the climate on the planet you're on but also on its very orbit and and when an orbit goes unstable it'll either fall into one of the stars or get ejected from the solar system entirely and in facts you do simulations or the formation of solar systems you can give a solar system like 40 planets and it'll settle out over time kicking planets out eating other plan down to some stable set of planets we think our solar system with its eight planets might have had dope don't even don't even get me started here so all I'm saying is it may be oh that there are more planets rogue moving between stars than there are in orbit around stars themselves dejected from the formation process of solar systems himself Nomad planets planets without a solar system what's that Nomad planets yes planets without us whole homeless planet homeless play that's correct hi I'm Sarah McLaughlin you know where the rest of the bit goes we don't have time for it but our our astronomical technology has gotten to the point one less one less thing about this place Oh what know what where we can actually see these interlopers coming through the solar system you may have seen the news at a second such asteroid like product an interstellar object they're calling them is OS coming through the solar system at a weird angle and we can watch them go by sometimes even just for a few days but they certainly exist and so I expect to see many many more of those as the years go by and our technology improves issues and another interesting thing they could actually possibly have life because we know on earth earth still has retained heat from its formation and their life forms thriving on geo chemical energy at the bottom of the ocean where they've never seen a sunlight on so if you have a rogue planet that could be an entire biosphere beneath the surface that cares not a whit that it isn't orbiting a star you know that's dope that's tough that is dough Charles at our next conference we have to say that's dope right after I talk about that we're gonna end that segment and go into our third segment give it up New York comic-con [Applause] New York comic-con 2019 yes all right we got to go there Charles yeah this whole say anywhere but there yeah it's no we have to explore whatever science we can find in Star Wars oh okay so how about but let's let's let's give it a scientific grounding let's talk about the planets that they find them on so there be exoplanets we're looking for as well as aliens yes they encounter do you think the famous barsy dude exactly so what's your judgement of how well they did the aliens in there um aside for the fact that almost all of them have two arms one head and two legs and one torso they did a pretty good job they're actors that have to get a page yeah yeah yeah hard to do otherwise although with digital technology now what's-his-face Jabba the Hutt has a tail right ways like that so yeah they're doing better and better I think more and more people are recognizing that alien life-forms are not limited by the imagination that we human beings have the the panoply of life that could exist is far beyond our own imaginations to be able to imagine them yeah well I would make a stronger statement than that if you look at other life-forms on earth that's true most of it does not look humanoid that's if I had two arms to let earthworms oak trees and octopus I'd said that right now he's the boy dr. poore yes uh most life on Earth in the Star Trek looks less like human Mr Man then the aliens in the bar scenes of Salwa that's right well in Star Trek The Next Generation Star Wars right now oh sorry but in the season seven episode the chase okay go in the season seven episode the chase they sort of tried to explain why maybe every humanoid species looks humanoid right there's a species that predated all of us that see that see that was there right so that could software of how unimaginative they're aliens were right and they backed into an explanation for it that's in ways that no one would have ever thought to do for Star Wars but you know the first Star Trek the Dorian's were very clever they did them well I'm sorry we talked about Star Wars yes so sorry so so tell me about the exoplanets that they land on why is it that no one ever needs a spacesuit when they land on a planet I think it's because they're so capable of going at their purported Lightspeed thing to anywhere in the galaxy at any arbitrary speed that they can just find enough planets that everyone lives perfectly and they don't have to have spacesuits so they don't need to go the ones that need spacesuits for right why would you yeah there's no point right yeah it's like you can pick and choose yeah it's what you're saying right well here's something that I thought was true and I later learned wasn't oh that you can find a planet that has nitrogen action oxygen atmosphere so you don't need a thing and you realize no it's not that planets have this random combinations of gases and you find the one that you could survive on we have oxygen in this atmosphere because we have life yeah so if you find a place with oxygen given our current understanding of things it probably has other life there as well that's right so it's a great point that's actually a really good point right right you're not looking for planets at random in that regard because oxygen is chemically unstable so if you have stable oxygen it means it's constantly being regenerated the stuff that pulls out other gifts others get added to it great point yeah so can you can you muster any other thing about Star Wars science well x-wings they can't fly they just can't Wow Tie Fighters they can't fly either well what if the typewriters are moving in the vacuum why do they need wings at all well that's the point because they legs are completely useless in the vacuum of space yeah but that I I think that what we're saying seeing in that environment is that the propulsion systems in Star Wars have somehow tapped into something that's not in our galaxy or universe maybe a force of some kind that we don't really understand they allow things that otherwise could not fly to fly what force that could be I just don't know it's a I don't want to force that explanation too much you don't want to be too forceful about that so a couple other things if you're moving through the vacuum your ship will not bank a turn right that's not how you turn in a vacuum right and now I'm not even commenting on all the sounds and explosions in space yeah that was what was good it was good I bet you do wookie really well to now do a wookie banking through space awesome so Charles what I think happened there is with the aliens yeah is that anything that sort of looks a little different from human is that's not from Earth it counted as alien for so many decades in people's imaginations in science fiction give it a third eyeball or give it an ant and Tennie or make it green or look like a gorilla yeah yeah just just put some other feature on it which it's intelligent but clearly not human and that satisfy people's need for what how different an alien might look the other nests what was on the screen well it mattered not so much sometimes it's a familiarity of what's on screen I mean when you look at the abominable snowman that you know tied Luc up in the snow cave yeah that's just an abominable snowman that's not like that's not like you know an alien we are like seriously that you no longer the island of misfit toys with a dentist with Rudolph yeah you know that's a really good point you know the idea that aliens and movies have to be different but not so different as to be unrelatable to us that's a great see right if on the ice planet hoth Luke Skywalker were dangled by some amoeboid like thing I guess we wouldn't feel so scared of it right wait wait wait so I agree with you but I don't with you so in other words I amaze you don't agree you're a neutral know what it what it means is you are right the alien has to have something you can relate to otherwise you can't relate to it like et all right DT even spoke a little English okay right both you all scare me sometimes did I tell you that 80 is actually a vegetable did you know this oh my I can turn plants yeah well so that the counselor white has such a good relationship as well just a plant in the bright someone said what what can I tell you how I know this please okay not just okay Steven Spielberg visited my office and we talked about Beatty and I said look the thing is it's got two arms two legs fingers a head eyes nose mouth it's human and so actually he conceived it to be a vegetable Wow does Steven Spielberg communicating directly to me I don't know first-hand knowledge for first-hand knowledge not here he'd get more first-hand than that that's right so but wait would that mean it'd be moral to eat eat eat so would a vegetarian eat eat a yeah that's the cat well he's sentient well I'm gonna tell you this many years ago there's a comedian named Paul Mooney I remember yeah and he used to do a joke he was like et he better be glad he didn't show up in the ghetto they would have put him in a pot of greens and ate his ass we've gotta end it there join me join me thinking Charles move our resident geek in chief Chuck nice I've been your host Neil deGrasse Tyson your personal astrophysicist and as always I bid you to let's try this again and as always I bid you to thank you all 14 of you thank you if I may take liberties it may I read a letter to if I may thank you oh thank you you remembered yeah I'm born happy birthday to you happy birthday to you happy birthday [Music] happy birthday too thank you I don't know why they plant Comic Con on my birthday I don't know how they did that so at the risk of sounding like it's a shameless plug I have a book coming out on Tuesday it's called letters from an astrophysicist and it contains correspondence I've had over the years with the public on all manner of very personal private things that I just never talked about on YouTube videos or on shows such as this and you've never seen me debate a creationist for example or UF ologist I'd never they're in here okay conversations with them in this book someone else is there at large hairy ape wandering the Pacific Northwest I engage that person in this book three letters are from prisoners one who's serving time and he won't be able to watch his kids grow through their teenage years wrote to me and said I just learned that they like science is there any advice you can give me that I can share with them to reassure them that I still love them I mean it's so there's some heart-wrenching stuff in here what I want to do is read to you the epilogue if I may it's very personal but so the epilogue I know I might there's some demanding people out there read it don't do this Rick okay damn y'all okay I got put on my old people glasses so hold on I haven't cuz I'm a I'm an old fart I'm probably 60% gray and it's all tinted now cuz it's like yes couple years I'll come out all grey and I'll be with y'all I see some great folks out there right there okay I'm with you okay by the way Neil we call that hair color okay all right epilogue a eulogy of sorts a letter to dad Saturday January 21st 2017 based on a eulogy I delivered to friends and family here in New York City at the Holy Trinity Catholic Church dear dad thank you for a lifetime of wisdom you've bestowed upon me drawn from moments circumstances and incidences in your life with your permission I'll share a few of that which for me rise above all others I've never forgotten the story of your high school gym teacher who highlighted your body type as one that would not make a good runner in the track and field unit of class your reaction nobody's gonna tell me what I cannot do with my life you immediately took up running you also ran in Hitler's Berlin stadium for the 1946 GI Olympics the post-war world was not ready for a traditional Olympics so this special event contested soldier athletes of the various theatres of conflict around the world and by college you became world class in middle distance races at one time capturing the fifth fastest time in the world for the 600 yard run during upon that example for inspiration I have overcome the most negative societal forces on my life's ambitions I've never forgotten the story of your best friend Johnny Johnson also a track star competing in a meet against the New York Athletic Club in the day they of course admitted only wasps so athletic Blacks and Jews instead competed as teammates for the Pioneer Club founded for that purpose as Johnny came around the last turn in the quarter-mile he was a head of the New York Athletic Club runner by several strides when he overheard the fellows coach audibly yell to his runner catch that [ __ ] Johnnie's reply to himself was simple and direct this is one [ __ ] he ain't gonna catch and lengthened his lead to the finish line what today might be called microaggressions back then were parlayed into forces of inspiration to excel from that example I've used such occasions in my life to excel beyond even the expectations I held for myself you told of immigrant grandma's work as its seamstress grandpa's work as a night watchman for the food service company horn & Hardart a good thing because he would occasionally bring home leftover food when the money was tight your stories of strife would never hate-filled never bitter instead they were hope filled and inspirational conveyed with tentative confidence that the arc of social justice will continue to bend towards righteousness I carry that vision for society's future into every day of my life you studied hard in school and took your interest in social justice all the way to your appointment as mayor Lindsay's Commissioner of New York City's human resources administration journalists don't write articles about news that does not happen but the program's you enabled in the inner city empowering the youths during the powder-keg years of the late 1960s ensured that any unrest or disturbance would be mild sure enough New York was calm compared with what went down in watts Newark Detroit Cincinnati Milwaukee and especially in Chicago Washington DC and Baltimore for which federal troops were called in to quell the violence you work behind the scenes on this with your only reward the quiet knowledge that the nation's largest city did not burn during the most turbulent years of the most turbulent decade in American history since the Civil War striving to do what is right without regard to who takes notice should be a model for us all your stories and perspectives I've got navigating people politics funding streams and the legacies of institutions deeply informed my successful efforts to create from whole cloth a brand new Department of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History you taught me that in life it's not good enough to be right you also must be effective for that I now count the formation of that department as one of the highest achievements of my professional career so dad this thank you is simply public notice of what I have already thanked you for in life bestowing upon me guiding principles for living my life to the fullest and along the way when possible lessening the suffering of others I know I will miss you because I already do Cyril deGrasse Tyson rest in peace October 19 27 December 2016 so listen all we love you comic-con there's nothing like a comic-con community a comic-con audience where the biggest fight anyone gets into is whether your cosplay was authentic and if the world were run by Comic Con attendees it would be a peaceful place and we'd have technology taking us into the future so yes it will be not who would have ever thought that the geek said who was pummeled and bullied in school would become one of the most strongest economic forces of the land as well as the people who everyone else comes to to fix their computer so I just want to say the comic-con community is a very special community I don't want any of you to forget that surely you won't thank you for indulging me in this letter to my father he was 89 so his death was not tragic but I miss him as we miss so many loved ones who have passed but you can tell if you speak of a loved one you bring them back to life and this is part of what it is to carry wisdom insights and love from one generation to the next Comicon thank you have a good night [Applause] [Music]

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 121,564

Rating: 4.9024391 out of 5

Keywords: StarTalk, star talk, NYCC, NYCC2019, New York Comic Con, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, Charles Liu, Star Wars, vibranium, science fiction, comic books, Iron Man, palladium, Star Trek, X-Wings, TIE fighters, Tatooine, Letters from an Astrophysicist, StarTalk Radio, Science Podcast, Space Podcast, Astronomy Podcast, StarTalk Live, full panel, et, et the extra terrestrial, full episode, live podcast, science, sci fi, space, astronomy, comic con, wonder woman, star wars, chuck liu

Id: kivYPx---DA

Length: 56min 48sec (3408 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 02 2020