Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Afterlife, Origins of the Earth and Extreme Weather

on Larry King now the brilliant Neil deGrasse Tyson who had Neil deGrasse Tyson one of my all-time favorite guests I mean you've had 60,000 guests the other yo one of my favorite Kirsch is so bright and you're funding well thank you I'm honored you know in the university in the world but you're in the universe we're all those who deny climate change or do you say to them I don't I don't care what you believe I believe whatever you want the problem comes about is if you are in denial of an emergent scientific truth and you wield power over legislation that's a recipe for disaster plus where's the wire this is the biochemical derivation of the electro physical magnitude why do we keep booking guests like this all next on Larry King now welcome to Larry King now we're in a beautiful hotel the Trump International we're in New York City on a spring day I grew up here there's nothing like spring in New York overlooking the park and our special guest is Neil deGrasse Tyson he is one of my all-time favorite guests he is a Renaissance man astrophysicist cosmologist science commentator TV host head of the Hayden Planetarium here in love where we went as kids these two ties with ropes and we walk along with you and the person perhaps most responsible for invigorating public interest in science Niels longtime radio programs Startalk is now also a TV series it is Mondays on National Geographic which is very appropriate talk more about that later it's good to see you Neil thanks for having me back and your Twitter account is now 3.5 billion you have jumped to millions since les we met yes I don't know whose I don't know I don't understand it really I want to remind people I'm an astrophysicist they can still pull out but it's I when I wake up and see those numbers it's for me it's evidence that there's an underserved appetite that people have for thinking about the universe and I'm happy and privileged to be in that role but I'm delightfully surprised every time I see those numbers rise I grew up with a bunch of guys in Brooklyn not one to my memory said you know what I want to be an astrophysicist and we decide what are you nuts burning well you know it's my first visit to the Hayden Planetarium where I now serve as director how old I was nine nine years old a family visit as a family we you know we went to all that all the places in the city we went to the zoo you know the art museum and and I think my parents were just it was a matter of exposure for my brother and my sister and me and you don't want your options to be limited when you're asked what I wanted what do you want to be when you grow up and the more things you see as a child the more options you have to reach for if something piques your interest and for me a first visit to the planetarium I've convinced in fact that it was the universe that show me then you have to be good at something in school which I gather was math well so man I like math but I think it it's wrong to say you have to be good at it I'd rather say you have to want to be good at it and then ambition kicks in and ambition can override whether or not your first foray was unpleasant or you didn't do well or maybe you flunked an exam but if you really like it you will spend time learning it that's if that's what liking something means maybe too many of us believe that we like something because you're good at it and sure there are plenty of cases where that's so but why deny yourself the pleasure of a life of pursuit of something that brings play I love the microphone I love the radio so all I ever wanted to do is this even a real microphone yeah it is it's not hooked up but it's a real miser River where's the wire of the electro physical magnitude like this you can do this so long they've liked neuro kempner Oh chemically attached it to your brain right they have to go in here Wow did you ever get discouraged along the way did you have a family test and say oh yeah I mean I remember discovery I don't know if this courage is the right word I remember opening a calculus book for the first time good luck in high school and calculus is not some natural next step after algebra right it's a completely different new way of thinking about the relationships of things that change in the world and you open up the book into all these squiggly lines and all these alphabet drawn from Greek letters and it's like I will never understand this ever should I bail now while I have the chance and I said let me let me just try this and a month later after I said hey think I know what that is Oh two months later hey three months later I got this and that was that that that moment for the rest of my life was it was it became proxy for me saying if at first encounter I have no clue what's going on just fence I mean it sounds simple but but you could it I would realize how profound that fact how profoundly that would affect the rest of my life anytime I saw some I didn't understand work at it do you use calculus all the time there is no understanding of the physical universe without calculus were you a nerd I was yet I was yes card-carrying I attended the Bronx High School of Science all of my time okay then this is three attest to get into that three yeah you did yeah not only take a test you have to like get above a score to get in right not just taken anybody take the test kind of get above the score but I I was the town old I am they make fun of you for being all the tailhold I am I was there and we formally learned calculations on a slide rule and my slide rule had a leather pouch and you go walking down you know yes the the best nerds had like the biggest slide rule pouch and you know it's almost like what your friends in walk down the hallway your friends in the hood make funny a little bit a little bit that because the hood that I was in was not sort of the stereotype hood that people imagined my earliest memories are the East Bronx and housing projects they are the Castle Hill middle-income housing projects but then my father's income went above that level and then they get a kick you out when that happens and so we moved and we moved to Riverdale all I'm saying that's what I'm saying Riverdale of town bras yeah yeah if that's uptown yes so in the Bronx there wasn't so much of the force of the hood that you might think but nonetheless they were pressure pressures for me to be athletic for and no one really cared about what I was doing but I cared about what I was doing coming up we'll talk about the mission to Mars privatization of space we'll talk about climate change we'll be right back we would Neil deGrasse Tyson one of my all-time favorite guests okay let's get to some things current when you've had 60,000 guests the other you're one of my favorite of course is so bright and you're fun well thank you I'm honored you know in the universe let's say in the world but you're in the universe we're all in the universe there's 80 billion stars more but we'll start with that anybody anybody know that there's a heaven that they've gone somewhere that there's an afterlife did anyone know that how they can boggles my mind they can believe they know of a belief is I could believe that it's raining right well this is the difference between believing something and using the methods and tools of science to establish what is objectively true and what is objectively true is something that is true outside of your belief system that's what science is that's how we can make stuff do you wonder how it all began oh of course what do you think well so depends what you mean by it all there was a dog piss well no I'm saying there was a day it all could be how did life get here how did the earth get here how did the Sun Moon solar system get here that the galaxy gets here now the universe get here and so all of our evidence points to a pretty fun beginning of the universe the Big Bang we got a term for it the Big Bang what was there before it it's a frontier of our investigation we got top people working on find out what was there before yeah yeah we don't know we don't know there before no before yeah we're not ready to put our top people on that one yet so the problem of origins is a very different kind of investigation from just describing just the existence of a thing and there many cups here and so we can say all this came out of a factory but this what made the factory well people made the factory that what made the people you keep going back and then you have the sort of the origins question because the are typically there's only one origin of anything so you can't compare it to other things and so it's it imposes special challenges - is that why many of you guys go nuts yes no just the ones you've selected alright why isn't it raining in California yeah you know the climate is I mean drought it's not like it's not as though droughts have no precedent in the history of the world but what's more important than that it's not raining is there you know there's a consumption of clean water potable water from the water table that's not being replenished as being pulled out at a faster rate than it's returning and that's a recipe for a disaster and so so we need to think more sort of there I use the word holistically about systems that that that manifest on this earth and and and that's a relatively new way to think about the world but what do we do about stump done yeah I don't I don't have easy answers I think we need to be better shepherds of our activities and our behaviors if you're watering lawn you're long do you need clean potable water to water your lawn no you could use the water that came out of your dishwasher your grass is not gonna care but we've set up a system that does not intelligently use even the limited water that's available bigger question why isn't it raining all I can tell you is that in the world what we're gonna find is more extremes of weather okay when it rains is going to rain heavier when it's not going to rain it's gonna rain less than it ever didn't rain before and as these extreme we have to this kind of the new normal we're gonna have to grow accustomed to in all evidence points to the fact that it is human-caused influence on the ecosystem on the on the climactic sister so cold weather will get cold a warm weather will get warmer what will will get wetter yeah yeah so the extremes you'll start visiting the extremes and what happens is as as the client as the temperature rises you more moisture from the ocean gets lifted into the atmosphere and generally when we think of weather think of storms and things and so now that when you have a storm there's more moisture to feed that storm there's more heating to drive the convective cells and so the storm gets more ferocious and you know we had flooding down here in New York by the way this change that people are talking about it's not one day the ocean will just sort of come in and stay there on your doorstep no it's not how it happens first it happens first where there would be a storm where there'd be a tide surge and previously the tide surge never real you know maybe came over the sidewalk or the boardwalk but that's about it and went away now the tide sure surge makes it into the streets and that's your first indication these extremes are your first encounter with what will soon become the new normal those who deny climate change or do you say to them the I in a free country which at least we believe we tell ourselves we live in a free country I don't I don't care what you believe I believe whatever you want the problem comes about is if you are in denial of an emergent scientific truth and you wield power over legislation that's a recipe for disaster the person on the street doesn't care about climate change or doesn't you know maybe I will have a conversation but I'm not gonna lose sleep over that it's when someone an elected official stands in denial of climate change something that scientists have been telling them now for decades and they're going to create legislation in response to that what that is the end of an informed democracy the end I love when I say I don't know anything about it but what it's not true and so by the way I don't beat politicians over the head you'll never see me arguing with a politician you know why because politicians representatives senators they are duly elected by a community of people the electorate so if they want to say the earth is 6,000 years old it's probably because their electorates think so and so as an educator my task is to educate the electorate so that they could then vote people into office who can make sensible legislative decisions that can affect us all and not derive from their personal private belief system the man who brought us cosmos has another show on the air is called Startalk and we'll talk about that and the rumored second season of cosmos after the break the bag will mr. Tyson what is Startalk oh thanks for asking they'd say it was an experiment radio show five years ago on a grant from the National Science Foundation and I've looked around and I saw well how does someone receive science through media and there's some fine science programming on NPR especially where died where there's a you know science Friday for example where and I've been on Science Friday loved it to death there's a journalist interviewing a scientist but if you're tuned into that chances are you know you already like science that's why you'd listen to it but how about the people who don't know they like science or how about the people who know they don't like science how do you get science to them so I thought why don't we invert the model and I'll be the interviewer I'm the scientist and my guests will hardly ever be scientist I would draw them they would be hewn from pop culture and and my conversation with them would be about all the ways science has influenced their life or that livelihood are you teaching or asking um so no so there's some teaching in there but it's really if these are people you would have heard of these people we've interviewed one of them is like President Carter all right I didn't ask him about the Middle East that's what other people do I asked him about his engineering background and how that might have influenced his his you know his diplomacy is he thinking differently from others who had a different background that's kind of interesting to me it might be interesting to others interviewed George Takei from the original story he's a fun guy but now on every level and we talked about the the the the science fiction projections for the future and what came true what didn't but he's from pop culture he's not a scientist he may played one on TV but he's not a scientist so you do this on so now it jumped species and the National Geographic Channel by the way cosmos wallet aired on Fox domestically and National Geographic delayed National Geographic took it around the world in 180 countries and so I had a relationship with National Geographic and they said at the end of cosmos we got to do more TV together and I said no it's not kind of what I'm about but I am doing this radio show maybe we could film that they agreed and now it's on late night like 11:00 p.m. the great man who started cosmos with Carl Sagan my man I interviewed him maybe a hundred times yeah Karl's billion so you can say if interviewed him maybe a billion times for you yeah he uh my first encounter with him was was memorable for me probably not for him but for me I had applied to college and I've told this story before I'd say fact we retell it in cosmos I'd applied to college and I'd know and I was interested in the universe I had been accepted at Cornell and then unknown to me the admissions office forward in my application to him for his comment and reaction he then sent me a personal letter hand sign saying I hear you're considering Cornell I'll be happy to give you a tour of the campus if you want to come up and visit to help you decide he was already famous he had been on Carson and scientists on Johnny Carson oh my gosh that was that that was nobody had done that before so he he had cleared the field for anyone who would come after him to do much of what he had pioneered and so I did go up he met me outside the building gave me a tour reached behind him didn't even look reach behind and pulled out one of his own books I just will never forget that you have written so many books she just reached behind and grabbed the book that happens to be there signed it to me I still have that book so I said to myself at the time if I am ever in a position to bring the universe down to earth in the ways he has then I will for sure be looking to students and others coming up with the dignity and respect that he Cornell's not a famous school of science no they do well gentlemen it was an Ag school and there's a huge AG agricultural dimension to it when I visit I love the barn the barn they take the the methane flatulence that cows so freely put into the air from their own digestive tract and then they use that to keep the barns warm by burning the methane over the winter so it's drained Cornell I know I didn't actually attend Cornell yeah yeah I know I actually didn't attend I attended Harvard oh yeah no no because it was I figured if I didn't want to go to Cornell just for one person because suppose he went to another place or whereas Harvard it was very deep and alcohols disappointed he won't be a letter he said I was he said I did not make a mistake by choosing Harvard what do you make of mr. musk and the others who of what they gonna be long they're gonna send their own planes up its rockets yeah I'm skeptical on a couple of levels by the way we need people thinking that way he wants to send a mission to Mars we need those people in society otherwise the rest of us think that every other day should be like the previous one so let me just lead with that but I can tell you that the first people to do really expensive things where there's the dangerous and people could die and there's no known return on investment those are not business people those are government's the first Europeans to the new world were not the Dutch East India Trading Company it was Columbus funded by Spain then he draws the maps and here's the trade winds and here's where the hostels are and the friendlies are here's where you find the fruit that you can eat then you can make a business case for it otherwise it's a really short meeting if I say hey I'm gonna go to Mars bringing all your venture capitalists and they start asking questions how much does it cost I don't know but a lot and is it dangerous yeah people probably die what's my return on investment I have no idea probably zero that's a five-minute meeting and it doesn't happen so you have to somebody's got to go out there with the long view the longer than the quarterly report view and once the patents are awarded and you've established what's dangers and what's safe then you make the business case I guess is the fabulous Neil Tyson when we come back I'm gonna talk about life and death and what he thinks what he believes what he has faith in after this we're back with Neil deGrasse Tyson he is one of the fabulous people in this country one of my favorite guests like to do her I'd like to tour with you just we do universities and I ask questions and we explore things okay you decide bring gigadyne you've except that's facts and belief I know the religious people believe the scientists has proved what do you believe what do you think happens when we die well so I I can make some unassailable statements about what happens when you die so you spend your life eating food food has a calorie content and calorie is a source of energy Kali is a unit of energy you bring it in and then the energy is available for you to maintain your body temperature at nearly a hundred degrees is 98.6 how do you keep something out of hundred degrees when nothing else around you is you're burning energy to sustain that because biologically we need to be at that temperature to function okay you also need energy to walk and to move that's why you eat food the moment you die what happens you don't maintain the energy your temperature drops how far does it drop to room temperature at a funeral in the casket if you touch the hand or the person in the casket your first thought is the body's cold no it's not it's room temperature but it's cold compared to a hundred degrees they're no longer burning this energy okay so now every one of your molecules has energy within it if you get cremated that energy gets released in the form of heat and you heat the air and that air radiates to space you get buried which is how I wanna my body to be disposed of bury me bury me because you know I I don't want the energy content of my body to just get radiated out into space of no use to anybody put me in the ground let the worms microbes come in and out of my body and the energy content of my body that I had assembled over my lifetime consuming the flora and fauna of this earth my body then returns to them and thus is the cycle of life I know that's gonna happen because you can measure where the energy goes and that's how I want to go out but you're not conscious and that's for eternity right all right there's no evidence that I have any consciousness of anything and by the way is that so weird did you have consciousness before you were born were you saying how come I'm not on earth oh my gosh I need to be on earth or how could wait where am I no it's just the state of non-existence so I'm not giving any us now I am born and I can't stand the thought of non-existence see I already have existence I don't ice okay then it is true we fear death because I born knowing only life right I get that however III take another view because I've been asked if you could live forever would you yes yes okay sure that's an attractive idea but the way I look at it is it is the knowledge that I'm going to die that creates the focus that I bring to being alive the urgency of accomplishment the need to express love now not later if we live forever why ever even get out of bed in the morning because you always have tomorrow that's not the kind of life I want to lead but why don't you fear not being around I fear living a life where I could have accomplished something it didn't that's what I fear I don't fear death they don't fear the unknown I love the unknown I I loved it you don't I want on my tombstone my sister has this in her in her notes because in case I can't tell anyone after I die on my tombstone a quote from Horace Mann great educator be ashamed to die until you have scored some victory for Humanity that's what I wanted my tombstone but you don't fear or think about not being around my grading regret for not being around would be it would be kind of cool to see my kids continuing don't you want to know yeah I would that be fun I want to see what inventions would make life easier what clever discoveries or innovations would arise out of the collective brain work what do you like species what do you think when you see religious people and you see Pope's or rabbis or people who fervently believe the Billy Graham's in the world was sincere and wonderful people yeah of course well actually maybe delusional that they've gone somewhere no they're there they're embedded in belief systems and what I look at is I see all the belief systems and when you line them up they're not really compatible with one another so whatever they're believing it can't be a truth that applies to everybody because other people believe what they do with no less fervor and so I sit back and as a person who's interested in objective truths and I say well it doesn't look like that's a path towards an objective truth so let people continue to think and say what but as a citizen of a country that is not founded on a honor honor on a religion it's founded with with sort of a secular construct in a way that protects whatever religion you want to express this is protected in the Constitution the Constitution doesn't actually mention God my rather controversial in its day and that it doesn't mention God because they don't want legislation to tell you what God to worship they knew this they knew how governments can persecute people who had belief systems that didn't agree with the state they knew this so they created those freedoms and so we have these freedoms go ahead but if you're going to create legislation that has to apply to everybody and you're now gonna put your belief system into legislation that is not a free and open democracy and you are an amazing man no the universe is amazing I'm just revealing that fact thanks to my guest Neil deGrasse Tyson Startalk airs Mondays at 11:00 p.m. 10:00 central on National Geographic is also available on Sirius XM and iTunes and remember you can find me on Twitter at Kings things and I'll see you next time I hope you

Channel: Larry King

Views: 952,473

Rating: 4.8715963 out of 5

Keywords: Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, scientist, Cosmos, StarTalk, Bill Maher, Carl Sagan, science, Elon Musk, Mars, climate change, denier, legislation, politics, Hayden Planetarium, California, drought, water, afterlife

Id: 4x2ZrklQQYU

Length: 29min 16sec (1756 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2017