Neil deGrasse Tyson on Aliens, Mars & Why an Asteroid Might Flatten Earth [Full Interview]

on Larry King now Sciences reigning superstar Neil deGrasse Tyson why am i interested in space because I think it's fascinating it's awesome it's limitless it's boundless and it holds the seeds of of everyone's curiosity what percentage of knowledge do we have if we look out in the universe and we look at all of the forces that are driving what's going on we actually can quantify how much of that we know and it's about 4% plus is there life elsewhere you run the numbers and you realize it would be inexcusably ego century to suggest that we were alone all next on Larry King now we're in New York we're at the top of Trump Tower how about bad view on a beautiful day in October and our special guest is Neil deGrasse Tyson mr. Tyson is an extraordinary gentleman the astrophysicist a scientist with a million and a half followers on Twitter the New York Times bestselling author hosts his own podcast called start talk he's director of the famed Haven planetarium when I was 8 years old they took me to have little boys we came from school his new show is cosmos it debuts on Fox in early 2014 he's the recipient of 18 honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Service Medal as the highest award given by NASA to a non-government citizen before anything else I went I grew up with a lot of guys not one want there to be an astrophysicist I don't know where you grew up Brooklyn where did you go well I actually grew up in the Bronx it's the Bronx and hold on power he wanted to be a four-star general you wanted to be an astronaut it's it's when you got in the yeah in the city this you don't have a relationship with the sky you look out at Eugene what is the building there there's back then there was smog and pollution so yeah it was a first visit to the Hayden Planetarium really good I now direct as a kid as a kid as a kid I was open kids in the logo today hey y'all at some point you go through a school trip and I guess it doesn't hit everybody the same way but it hit me sitting there in the chair and the lights went out and the stars came out and and I think the universe chose me really yeah I don't think I had any say in them so right then you need I knows was July age 11 I figured out you can do it as a career at age 9 you're not thinking career you're just thinking what's one of the daunted fascinated you the the vastness the infinitude I don't that word exists but you know what I mean by good words yeah and it's it's just the idea that to understand it goes beyond Earth and requires methods and tools and and talents and then I've learned you have to know math because the universe the language of the universe is mass and figuring it out figuring that out that early it meant I didn't have any sort of math anxiety because I wanted to talk to the universe if you want to talk to somebody you're gonna learn their language and there's no no fear factor at all something currently we're in the midst of a government shutdown as we speak 97% of all NASA employees are furloughed what are the implications well I'm glad they keeping the folks who are watching after our astronauts on the space station somebody's got a watch after them and yeah and also are one of our next flagship missions the James Webb Space Telescope you might think of it as the follow-on to the Hubble Space Telescope that was going through some crucial testing that they managed to keep a few of the employees on the NASA employees who are monitoring those cryogenic tests but it's not just NASA the whole government and I you know people like to blame the government but this is a democracy I thought and we elect all these people who just shut down the government so we have a law that they don't want to follow so they've shut down yeah but otherwise I think if you really sort of part the curtains we are behind all of this because we elected these people who shut down the government maybe we're electing the wrong people good idea huh why is and this is asked by a lot of people is NASA in all of the problems we have in the world poverty and hunger why is my space important well I think of space well let me split that question there's why am i interested in space because I think it's fascinating it's awesome it's limitless it's boundless and it holds the seeds of everyone's curiosity I mean to whatever extent curiosity is written in our DNA NASA fulfills the expression of that curiosity in us all don't tell me you've never walked out at night and looked up and just wondered in a stupor of how far away the stars are what they're made of are there is the life out there how did it all begin how's it gonna end and as Kennedy said we are made we made to explore but is it more important so that's my lens that's why I do so now you want to get practical yeah that's fine let's look we can get practical when I think of space I think of a seductive force on us all especially in the educational pipeline that stimulates people to want to study science engineering math and technology the STEM fields if I order that right science technology engineering math and that when you do that whether or not you land in space and a space activity you have otherwise stoked the population with people who think differently from others when we for example if a hurricane is coming what's the first thing you say oh let's run or buy toilet paper or let's buy up all the water from the convenience store yeah that's one way to think about it and another one is how can we tap that energy of the hurricane so that it doesn't level the city maybe it can power the city it would have otherwise leveled how do we do flecked that asteroid rather than asking where to run so you can hide from it when you have scientists and engineers in your midst different questions get asked and different solutions arise solutions that transform our culture transform who and what we are to this earth why didn't you become an astronaut at the time who are the astronauts I mean I'm old enough to remember the 60s although I was really a participant in the 70s and they were choosing these folks with like crew cuts and they were military pilots this is at a time when the Vietnam War was becoming less popular and hair was the number one musical on Broadway I didn't feel like they were talking to me now they would take you oh yeah well I think probably would have to possibly go have but back then there was no intersecting plus where is NASA going at the time they're going into orbit around the earth I'm saying you want to put me in space take me somewhere do you think the public the public represented in Congress has turned away from NASA a bit I think and it's to our own peril not the least of which is the risk of asteroid impacts one of which rendered the dinosaurs extinct 65 million years ago you know if they had a space program they would have figured out a way to deflect the thing but they don't even have opposable thumbs much less their walnut-sized where he on them he said them it's not beyond us if we go extinct on earth because of an asteroid impact we'd be the laughingstock of aliens in the galaxy we'll be right back with Neil deGrasse Tyson we've just started and I wish I had seven hours from boy I guess is the incredible Neil deGrasse Tyson I don't know where to even go with this is so wonderful talking to you that's my first time on your show I know you'll be you'll be many times but I'd like to just go on and do shows with you for a we had a mutual for a Cause Sagan call second Oh indeed I knew all the early astronauts I've been around I was with time with the Kennedy when he started the space probe no one denies that you've been around you get stored what is it like to become a celebrity astrophysicist yeah I didn't even think those two words ever belonging became that in the same sentence right now I get I get stopped by strangers in the street between fifty and a hundred times a day wanna know what well what's interesting is they say are you the Astra yeah and and the good part of that is most of the time they're saying tell me more about the black hole that I heard you and and so really their object of interest is not me it's the universe and I'm just a conduit between them and the cosmos serving up their their smorgasbord we have a view to a friend Bill Maher you go no more after I've done three times yeah this may seem stupid but um I went to Lafayette High School that's it all right what do we know and what don't we know what what what oh what percentage of knowledge do we have here's a scale of a hundred we have no idea how much we don't know in any real terms however if we look out in the universe and we look at all of the forces that are driving what's going on we actually can quantify how much of that we know and it's about 4% for firs about 4% so in other words there if this going on in the universe that to this day stumps us and you add up all the stumping phenomena in the in the cosmos and this amounts to the dark matter we don't know 85% of all the gravity in the universe has a source about which we know nothing we call it dark matter with dark energy the universe is accelerating in its expansion against the wishes of the collective gravity of all the galaxies we don't know what's cause we can measure it but we don't know what's causing it add it up it's 96% of all there is so we're really on the precipice staring out into an abyss of ignorance speeding you call Sagan reboot cosmos yeah yeah for the 21st century it's been 33 years what does that do it say well we we went all around the world we're finishing up actually this month that the filming and then there's the vo work and and the special effects and the animations and the visualizations so we expect it to come out next spring actually Ariane Fox that's gonna be great yeah we all have very strong hopes for it we have andrian as the is the writer she's she was one of the co writers of the original series so we have genetic links back to the original of course Carl is not with us when you want to go into space I would but if you can send me someplace I don't want it like boldly go where hundreds have gone before driving around the block as what the Space Shuttle had done it'd be fun to see earth but I'd rather wait until we can actually go somewhere take me to Mars to an asteroid I'll follow you on a ride a comment when will we be there and by the way just to put this in context if I take a schoolroom globe and ask you relative to that size how how high up is the Space Station Space Shuttle it's 3/8 of an inch above a schoolroom globe and somehow we're all convinced that that space no not not to me not to an astrophysicist and how far away is the moon 30 feet away the full width of a room away Mars a mile away from a school room globe if it was strongly that are we gonna get there I the only two ways we can get there one is if China tomorrow says they want to put military bases there in ten months one months to design fun build and engineer the space grab that nine months to get there of course you don't want to go into space I don't at least want to go war to be the driver even though that's what drove us to get to the moon we don't remember that error as being war driven one of you the first week but we we the Russians were our threat and the moon was the new high ground so another completely noble goal at least in a capitalist culture is you do it because there's can be a strong economic return to your culture to your nation I had a psychologist tell me once the day the world changed for America was when Russia put someone in space before us completely and in fact if we were really candid with ourselves we wouldn't actually remember a role in that space race as pioneers because in fact we were reactive we were primarily reactive de Russia did not proactive they put a they put a Sputnik we go ballistic literally and figuratively and we found NASA NASA was founded the same week I was born so I feel a little connectivity there then they sent up put a human in orbit we put a human in orbit they put up they just go up they put the first non-human animal we everything we did was in reaction to them we right back with the extraordinary mr. Tyson into this the back with Neil deGrasse Tyson who I promised you would be to have his own show on aura or will be with us frequently course I love guests like this because it just boggles my mind there people are this up is there life elsewhere well if you think if you look at the numbers just first the ingredients of life on Earth they're not special they're made a carbon nitrogen oxygen this these are the most common ingredients in the universe so you can't appeal to our special chemistry because it's everywhere now how many locations might you have life if life existed on a planetary surface how many planets are out there well we've got an inventory in the making right now the Kepler telescope which recently recently had some some mechanical failures but not before it gave us a list of a thousand planets out there orbiting stars that are nearby the Sun and that's just in our little pocket of the Milky Way galaxy so so you run the numbers and you realize it would be inexcusably egocentric to suggest that we were alone in the universe and so anyone who's actually studied the problem we say sure sure there's the the statistics strongly argue in favor of life and whether it's intelligent life that we would call intelligent here's here's you want to lose sleep maybe there's life that's so intelligent it doesn't consider us to be intelligent we came up with our own definitions of what intelligence is imagine they are so brilliant they look at this as a novelist they wouldn't even deign they wouldn't even waste their time any any more that wit that you walk by a worm in the street that just crawled out gasping for air after a morning rain do you say gee I wonder what the worm is thinking I wonder no you can't can you you step on the worm alright so so I the hubris of us to suggest that we are intelligent no other life on earth has ever been intelligent and we can then have a conversation with other intelligence it therefore hubris to believe in God it would be I think if your God created the whole universe just to put you in it because you pose an interesting question there was a there was a monk back just pre Galileo just a little pre Galileo his name is Giordano Bruno who who had just learned about Copernicus's work that maybe the Sun is in the middle of the known universe instead of Earth well if Earth is just one of the planets and earth has life maybe other planets have life think about it once you realize that earth is one of many it opens up a whole world of questioning and he said well if that's the case then and if all these lights in the night sky are Suns just like our Sun then maybe they all have planets then maybe the whole universe is teeming with life that got him into trouble because back then religious philosophies did not allow the universe to contain any kind of intelligence beyond what God would have court can here on earth and an astrophysicists be religious of course well any I think religion has has been with us since we came out of the jungle but to believe in a judgmental god someone hovering all those if you look at the numbers I just tell you the numbers the numbers scientists on average are less religious than the population okay but that number is not zero so then you ask well what does it mean for them to be religious I tell you this if they're active contributing scientists they're not running around telling you that the universe was made in six days it's a different kind of religiosity that the scientist has it's more of a spirituality more a feeling of a creator rather than using the Bible as a science textbook oh it's death that defies us writers yeah I mean we know death no religion perhaps we would we fear death perhaps because we're born knowing only life right so what else are we left to do to fear that unknown the so what at all I'm saying is that the religious scientists are they surely will have a spirituality about them but it's not the kind where they're running around trying to change the science curriculum your parents encouraged you to do this they didn't encourage anything all they would be very precise about this they took we grew up in New York City rich with cultural institutions we every weekend we went to zoo the music and Museum of Natural History art museums the opera plays we went to everything that adults do that is beyond just doctor lawyer Indian chief to show the full range the dynamic range of what curious talented people can do as adults and in that I got exposed to the planetary my brother is an artist he was enchanted by the Art Museum's when in fact went to high school of music and art my sister's the one sellout she went into corporate America but what high school I went to the Bronx High School of Science they is probably recently logs 8 we got our eighth Nobel Prize among what college went to Harvard and majored in physics knowing all along that astrophysics was not a black man's world and it's not at the time and in fact every one of my ambitions went expressed in our culture was you know I want to join the physics Club know you looks like you're good at basketball why don't we we'll set it up so that you can play on the basketball team and we'll send your rides back home from schools it was as though my interest were the path of most resistance or dear father do my father was active in the civil rights movement in fact he became commissioner under Mayor Lindsay here in New York Commissioner the manpower and career development agency and the human resources administration so he was right there thinking about the youth in the ghetto as the inner city was known back then and so New York City didn't have the riots that you found in watts and in and in Detroit over that period there was a certain communication channel established between the inner cities and end and but in a City Hall was his first as Cyril his name is Cyril deGrasse Tyson I might have met him I might have heard of you I've done doing his 56 years and I interviewed many many many figures in the civil rights movement in the 60s I was in that movement he was in a non elective office but he was in the back back room trying to get stuff done but so by the way my mother was a housewife with who would later go to college once we were nearing empty nest so there was no force operating saying thou shalt be a scientist but what they saw is that when I expressed this interest in the universe at age nine they nurtured it they didn't they didn't make it what it was they can't do they didn't ever exactly and that's a different kind of way you raise somebody I we all know people who became whatever it was because their parents were that rather than became what they are because their parents nurtured their already expressed interest when we come back we'll take some social media questions for our extraordinary guests Neil deGrasse Tyson longer who back when Neil deGrasse Tyson the director of the Hayden Planetarium among thousands of other things books podcasts and everything and I hope he becomes a regular with us with us I'm fascinated by all this before we give them these social media questions you look different glass is half-full or half-empty I think that question is overplayed and the way I view it is if you are in the process of filling the glass it's half-full if you're in the process of drinking the contents that was in it it's half-empty so that question I think can be enlightened by more information added to it and then you can look at the trend line of what is going on half-empty or half-full it's like the chicken egg we have an answer to that too but people keep thinking it's a deep profound answer the answer is the egg came first it was late but it was laid by a bird that was not a chicken I'll think about is it true that you only tweet in 125 characters yes I tweet a hundred and twenty-five characters not 140 why is that because I want I don't want people to have to edit what I tweeted for them to retweet it lately there are utilities where you can retweet without having to eat characters of our tea space at Neil Tyson space but RT space at Neil Tyson space that's 15 characters and if you're gonna retweet it I don't want you shortening my words into this ghastly abbreviation speak because my word I want the words to be there so 125 characters come sales right no I'd like to put in a room together my late friend Steve Jobs and you that would have been an interesting day at Johnny bash of via Twitter wants to know what would happen if the earth stopped rotating for a second oh yeah that would be disastrous asterisk because right now here in New York you can calculate at our latitude we are all moving with the earth at 800 miles an hour due east because earth is rotating if you stopped earth and you weren't seatbelt buckled to the earth you would fall over and roll 800 miles an hour due east it would kill everyone on earth people be flying out of windows and that would just be a bad day on earth I'm just saying now if you if somehow we all slowed down so anything not bolted to the earth would would slide due east 800 miles an hour that's what happens to you in a car if you hit a brick wall and you're not wearing a seat belt you keep going that's why you get hurt in those kinds of accidents if somehow we all slowed down with the earth then okay it's fine I mean people think we'll somehow we'll be weightless or we'll lose our atmosphere no it's just that you have really long days at ski boot one ask what's the thing that has surprised you most in the physics world in the physics world I'm surprised can I give a cop-out answer there I'm surprised that the United States could lead the world in particle physics for most of the 20th century and then just abandon that leadership and now the most powerful particle accelerator is in Europe at CERN the center for the European Center for Nuclear Research but if you spell that in French it spells CERN ahead of us and they that it's that particle accelerator that found the god particle the famous Higgs boson and we're just looking over across the pond saying oh can we do a few of our scientists are on the project but we're not the leaders of it so you ask what surprises me in physics that we could by vote of Congress cede that leadership that quickly and I'm astonished I wonder what country am i living in it's not the one I grew up in it's something different I know it's a cop-out answer but that's our danger Dave 7:23 tweets what obstacles do we have to overcome in order to facilitate interplanetary travel oh okay you know if worried you just left the solar system the Voyager spacecraft it was in all the news a few weeks ago traveling fast all right and it's at this boundary between the sun's influence and the galactic influence and so you can say well if you if you hitched a ride on that how long would it take you because that's been going for 40 years how long would it take you to get to the nearest stars the nearest star in a galaxy that has a hundred million stars in it excuse me 100 billion stars in it the nearest star take you 40 thousand years so the question what does it take to become interstellar space we already have to figure out a way to live a really long time more send a crew of astronauts that are really fertile so that the eightieth generation down the line is the one who lands at the destination or we have to find out something new about the fabric of space and time so that we can basically invoke the famous warp drive engines that are common in Star Trek allowing them to cross the galaxy during the TV commercial gene lush our own tweets all of that what can we expect the North and South Poles to shift when can we expect them to shift and what manifestations will we experience they don't shift yeah there was a lot of talk about pole shifting as we went into the year 2012 all the 2012 hysteria which was basically a hoax on scientifically illiterate people of the world and so the pole earth rotates and the pole Bob's up and down over tens of thousands of years and we and we oscillate like this the way a top does when you see a top begin to slow down what nobody plays with tops anymore I love well you got a level top I play with a logo you spin it and then it begins not alone the official word is precess we do that and we do one full precession every 26,000 years we don't flip one other thing do you still as they're still a little boy in you that looks up and wonders I the the little boy has never left in fact a scientist is a child who has never grown up because you've been in rooms with kids they're poking at things and and they're near breaking everything and the what is the adult telling him to not you know slow down stop we spend the first year of a kid's life teaching them to walk and talk and the rest of their lives tell them to shut up and sit down we saw the creativity that is built in our DNA and the few who survive these these squelching forces of surrounding adults they become scientists thank you man it's over Neil deGrasse Tyson what can I say see you next time you

Channel: Larry King

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Keywords: neil tyson, hot ones, the universe, intersellar, the martian, earth stop rotating, faith, flatten earth, space travel, cosmos, astrophysics, universe, space, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, A Spacetime Odyssey, astrophysicist, astronomer, civil rights, startalk, neil degrasse tyson talks about life after death, neil degrasse tyson alien spacecraft, neil degrasse tyson funny answer, neil degrasse tyson cosmic interloper, neil degrasse tyson interview, neil degrasse tyson tech support, complex

Id: PTqqiDQP02I

Length: 28min 1sec (1681 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/buneter]

How could it flatten earth if it's flat already