StarTalk Live with Neil deGrasse Tyson: Searching for Life in the Universe

this episode of star talk is brought to you by curiosity stream so tonight we're going to talk about the exploration of the universe and the search for life in that exploration and what impact they might that might have on us philosophically culturally religiously on our artwork and all that we are and define ourselves to be as humans and let's bring out oh yes you like that okay so let's bring out one of my scientific gets a colleague and a friend in fact a hometown native give a very warm welcome to dr. Carolyn Porco [Applause] Carolyn Parker's at hometown native she's a planetary scientist she was head of the imaging science team of the Cassini mission to Saturn if you saw any image of Saturn in the last 15 years she did it she and the team I call her Madame Saturn thank you thank you I love that um it is my great pleasure to bring out comedian wonderful comedian from wet hot American summer and many many other things ladies and gentlemen here's a new show called debate Wars out on sea so ladies and gentlemen Michael Ian Black [Applause] you know what I'm gonna go around want me to go around [Applause] and from Saturday Night Live and trainwreck ladies and gentlemen Vanessa Bayer [Applause] and rounding this out we can't do this if we're going to talk about art we need an artist so we're gonna talk about the impact of science on our lives we need somebody who sits at that intersection give a very warm welcome to musician and artist Sean Ono Lennon [Applause] oh right so let's just get some basic science on the table Carolyn we went to Saturn we didn't he did it in an awesome way we went it we entered orbit back in 2004 for and it's been going gangbusters since then yes why go to Saturn oh wow sorry okay be a little more specific what were you after what do we not know about Saturn that you found out well let me back up in a start I'm at the beginning with the Voyager mission okay the Voyager mission we toured the outer solar system in the 1980s and we had two spacecraft encounter Saturn in 1980 and 1981 and that was really the first time we ever got a glimpse of what the Saturnian system offered so we got to see the surfaces of the satellites we got to see the Rings in some detail and as these things often happen you know it was just a wonderful exploration and journey of discovery and all those accolades you've heard but they really leave us with other questions that we like to answer and so as soon as the Voyager mission was over everybody was deep into planning the next mission to return to Saturn because that was considered the system the planetary system it is the planetary system that is the most phenomenologically rich so it has Titan that means it's the most beautiful it's also the most beautiful I was in the privileged position of being responsible for the images that we returned so I just very much wanted to make them beautiful yeah just give give it up yeah [Applause] so you couldn't just send Cassini there you needed some gravitational help last I remembered we got it launch it from Earth and you don't have enough energy enough propulsion to get it there so you steal orbital energy from what well this is a maneuver that was found before going to Voyager but if you fly a spacecraft by a planet let's say that is already moving then depending on how you fly the spacecraft by the planet you can actually take a little bit of momentum from that body but because the planet so big and the spacecraft is so small you really give a big kick to the spacecraft so in order to get to Saturn we actually flew around the inner solar system for two years kind of parked it there building up speed we flew by Venus twice the earth once and it never went back in time you did a double slingshot around Venus not around we just flew by it by its slingshot Venus and you also slingshot earth yes we did okay now did we just get you just got lucky that you ended up on Saturday you would figured all this out look I tell you if they had left me in charge of the navigation we would ended up in Uranus so they do have a group of people they haven't they have a group I'd like well anyway terrible I have terrible sense of direction she just reference your I know yeah okay but but so so this is like a three cushion pool shot off of three planets any more planets on the way no no then we went by Jupiter and we went by Jupiter incidentally on the eve of the year 2001 which I thought was like so incredibly bitching bitching 1963 was the venue center Camaro so all right so you slingshot Jupiter and now you got enough energy to get to Saturn yeah just twice again as far away as Jupiter is yes I'm it's another three years to do it so it took us seven years in total to cross the solar system alright cool and then it gets pulled into orbit and you've got rings you've got magnetic fields you've got all manner of things going on there you want my favorite I've two favorites one you found lightning on Saturn we did yes we captured lightning on Saturn and it's raining like what's going on well it's doing essentially what lightning does here it's company by thunder and rain and so on these are big convective storms that produce your brain on Saturn yeah we do is it water water or some other liquid what this is in the water clouds yeah the water clock but you have other clouds and if they rained it wouldn't be rain water it'd be like rain ammonia or something it could be rain ammonia I guess we're that's too deep for us to know much about what we knew about the water clouds okay Debbie we ammonia rain but everything would be clear all rights all right we got that and then what freaked me out to this day was this hexagon in Saturn's with South Pole with it north North Pole a hexagon no we know there are no hexagons in the universe how did you what is that okay so this is I'm glad you brought this up because every time we released something about the hexagon on our website Cyclops org or hits went through the roof you know because I think people think this has something to do with crystal energy and what it what's of you know yes aren't like a hexagon is a common crystal cross-sectional shape yeah but it's the straight sides in an atmosphere that really blew people away so we've explained over and over and over again that this is just a continuous wave with just six waves in it jet stream that encircle Saturn it's nothing more than that it's very similar to what we have here on the earth except on the earth it's very discontinuous because the system that jet stream is traveling over the oceans and Hillandale and so on and friction just wears it down but on Saturn there is no friction so it just is continuous so is it was just so it's like in my mind it's like this I'm like picturing the shape that you learn about like when you learn about octagon hexagon is six-sided so right I knew that so and then there's and then there's there's water it's jet streams well it's a jaqen it's a jet stream of air on Saturn and at that level I don't know it's probably hydrogen mostly hydrogen but it's it's it's just a jet stream its just very regular because there's nothing to disturb it that's and it's at the bottom no it's in the top or the atmosphere it's at the pole got it okay so so so so Carolyn I just want to comment that you're all calm and casual or it's just the hexagon degree which is Wayne don't tell me you didn't freak out when you first saw the hexagon well we first saw the hexagon with Voyager and I was very free Keable when I was young but you know by the time that's linen if you get your freak on you know so uh so it's just easy in retrospect to say how to explain what you're looking at but it seems to me that's a pretty impressive thing to discover on a planet that's all and you said well Earth has it too it's just not a hexagon but then we don't have it well ok so that's why we went you asked why do we want to discover all those things they're the same and are different about our planet because ultimately we want to learn about process and process the more we learn about process about planets the better custodians of our own planet we can be so that's what planetary exploration is all about it so aside from having aside from having a really bitchin time all right so I tell me about the any questions you thought you would have answered but didn't get answered oh well we still don't know exactly what the mass of Saturn's rings are and it's important if you're interested in figuring out how old they are where they came from and that whole process so in fact that's what the end of the Cassini mission is aiming to do eventually to measure the mass of Saturn there's they're really skinny they are really skinny they're only about thirty feet thick yet they extend for 280,000 kilometers which is about one light-second it would take light the fastest thing we know one second to travel across the Rings they would fit in nicely between the earth and the moon and we've discovered so many things in there just let me know when we can start them now [Laughter] I'm gonna explain this in layman's terms for the audience Saturn's really big really big why are the Rings so thin in comparison you really want to know the answer to this no I just asked I felt like I should say something but just to be clear they are so thin when Saturn is edged on when their edge on to us they disappear entirely well not really let me try that again they're so thick they disappeared then are they they disappear mostly Muslim [ __ ] but they but you wanted to know okay it's a real simple physics 101 explanation I didn't get that far they consist of lots and lots and lots of icy particles chunks of ice that are like that tiny all the way to the size of small apartment buildings and when they collide which they did in the early days after they formed and we think they formed by two satellites colliding with one another something like that this creates a cloud of debris and these particles are in very wild and crazy orbits and when they collide they lose energy but they conserve angular momentum this is a process that even has produced the disks of galaxies that we know they collect the spiral galaxies which are very thin also compared to their horizontal dimensions so does that mean that earth will eventually have a ring of space junk and debris hahaha well it would have to it could if we left enough junk up there so that they collided that actually would happen yeah and as in Saturn just like a mini solar system I mean in terms of the way this our solar system formed and can't you make that analogous the way the discs are yes the moon count if you want to analogize into planets what's the moon count for Saturn right now I've lost track it's as over 60 s over 60 we don't know how many moons I'm sorry I don't not yet allow me to defend this bit of ignorance girl can't know you reach a point where the number of something is not as important as what the thing actually is good for you sounds like a complex so so when people were taught that there were nine planets in the solar system and then Pluto got kicked out people cried foul because they thought science was about the number and they got Jack to do with the number if it didn't they just find a ninth planet anyway and is that why science has since stopped measuring things but hasn't cleared up and replaced by some they detected a wobble that might mean there's another planet out there that we didn't know about way verify in the Kuiper I just find that so hard to understand that we could have had a planet in our own solar system that we haven't seen it you know this episode is brought to you by curiosity stream a subscription streaming service made for those of you who have no shame in your nerd game with over 2500 DQ memories and nonfiction titles from some of the world's best filmmakers including exclusive originals get unlimited access starting at just $2.99 a month and for our audience the first 31 days are completely free if you sign up at curiosity stream comm slash Startalk and use promo code Startalk make sure you check out Stephen Hawking's favorite places renowned physicist Stephen Hawking takes a flight of epic proportions to visit his favorite places in the universe a three part curiosity stream original series and an Emmy winner go to curiosity stream comm slash star talk for unlimited access to the world's top documentaries at nonfiction series and for our listeners and a promo code Startalk when prompted during the signup process and your membership is completely free for the first 31 days all right so so among the 60 moon 60 plus means there couple of moves that rise up in their significance to those in search for life or interesting things going on on move so what what can tell us about yes so these are the two best moves there are okay the first one is tightened it's about 50% larger than our own moon it has a thick atmosphere of molecular nitrogen it has a thermal structure that's like our own Earth's here and so it's in some sense it's a mini earth except that it does not have oxygen in it free oxygen and its atmosphere and it has organic materials in its atmosphere and those organic materials we suspected would be found on the surface in liquid form and we didn't find them at first then we didn't find them after a year or two and then finally we found that they went to the polls the liquids on Titan are liquid hydrocarbons that are ponded at the poles and that's a word pundit pandu that's cool I like someone get riseth on that's good I like it doesn't that we made it a word here now if it wasn't previously okay I think it was a word so so so liquid hard like methane methane and ethane yes so things like methane is the gas that comes out of your stove typically if you live in a city so that's flammable that's very far most good question about moons just for the audience I do know the answer the difference between like a moon and a planet is that the moon orbits around yes and they're generally smaller generally okay there's some moons that are bigger than the planets no I don't really think so there's only one you said generally that I got because I was just covering my body so Eugene if the moon were bigger than the planet the planet would be the moon and the moon would be the planet yeah yeah that's what I figured until he said generally they're made of like the same kind of cool stuff right but not the same stuff right well they're all different but do moons have elements in common that you know all share certain elements that they're all made by elements I mean like all right let me help you oh yeah sure help them out so in the Saturn system for example the moons are largely made of water ice because it's so cold out there that water becomes you know it's like a rock you get to Uranus and then you get to Neptune which are much farther out you have moons that actually have methane on there sir solid methane so it just solid methane yeah so you pull the gas down you liquefy it cool it some more then you get a solid and that's laying around the moons of Uranus and Neptune yeah is also liquid nitrogen I mean you know most of our atmosphere I mean a solid nitrogen most of our atmospheres is molecular gaseous nitrogen but by the time you get to Neptune Neptune we've got nitrogen on the surface it on on Pluto you heard a lot about nitrogen flowing on the surface of Pluto yeah yeah you used to hear about it but to Vanessa's point hey let's leave time to get to my favorite moon Vanessa yeah just to be clear yes the fact that the moon is comprised of ingredients that are essentially identical to Earth's crust is one of the factors that led us to suggest that the moon was formed by a sideswipe of a planetesimal in the early solar system scattering countless tons of Earth's crust into a ring of debris around Earth that would later coalesce and form what today we call the moon hallelujah but didn't they just study the moon rocks that they've gotten in 1969 and they just realized that the collision that created the moon was not a graze it was actually something a lot more impactful I just reads up on everything I got watch out for you yeah yeah we gotta watch out so the question is how deep did it actually graze actually and it could not have gone too deep because if you get too deep in Earth on earth when Earth was molten in its early days the heavy stuff fell to the middle the lighter stuff floated to the top so nearly all of Earth's iron and platinum and iridium and gold is in our core and if you psyched if you sideswiped enough to reach the core you would scatter the heavy elements into what would become the moon and the moon would have an appreciable amount of heavy elements it doesn't it just doesn't for something that size it should have a whole iron core and it got nope it's got nothing no so I shouldn't go to the moon to get any platinum well now I need a new thing to do in February so I just want to be clear but he has a completely sensible question and that question when applied to the earth-moon system led to an entire new understanding of the formation of the moment just so which planet is a candidate to the sideswiped us which right which planet is a candidate to we think it may be completely destroyed oh just it's gone is that what the asteroid belt is now or something asteroid belt yeah it's got a lot of debris but if you add it all up it doesn't come to much okay it comes about like 5% of the mass of the moon right yeah it's very it's fair enough I wouldn't had to be a planet sized thing and it's likely that this the projectile broke up and is now part of the moon can I offer an alternate hypothesis yeah space right space for a laser gun gamma ray gamma ray yeah laser gun it could have been what level beaten are you I can't remember can't divulge it alright so yeah Titan but if we gonna look for life which inspires so much of our invested emotion and energy in space exploration Titan doesn't sound like the place we would find life as we know it yeah it would be very difficult very fine the killer wouldn't look like a goat or it would be like super not a go yeah yeah not a go right so can you ask him about it is that what you were asking we don't done so what else is tantalizing okay so life so to me the most provocative and most thrilling result we found is that this little moon called Enceladus which is no bigger across than England I mean it's very small has geysers she was shooting out that extend hundreds of miles above the surface in fact they if you follow some of them they go tens of thousands of kilometers away from Enceladus and they form the e-ring but these geysers we now know after being there but just like the Saturn's rings have been lettered yeah one of which is called the here a one of which is called the okay the Pentagon has an earring Oh does it I've got a phone that has a ring how many rings dissenter don't ask those questions let me finish one thought at a time tell me about it so you know you know we don't count things anymore right one last County so eerie I mean Enceladus so these geysers we know come through four major fractures at the South Pole which is a really unique interesting terrain structures in the ice in the ice in the ice shell sorry there's an ice shell that exists lies on top of a global ocean of salty liquid water that is suffused with organic materials and we know that because after being there awhile we we figured all this out and then later on in the mission we actually send the spacecraft through the plume to pick up material and analyze its composition so like we got this down pat you have that much remote control over what next orbit your spacecraft took you know you know how you operate drones yeah wait so when you say organic material what do you mean like what constitutes did we find space Cael close to it close enough but a simple stuff like you know things compounds that contain carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and things like that those are the basic bye what I'm kidding sorry the basic bio elements that you and I are made out of yeah you know plus a lot more but especially you [Laughter] okay so Carolyn I I'm less impressed that there are organic materials there because these you just listed some of the most common kinds of atoms in the universe the question is is in sodus in a kind of state where we can think of it containing life as we know it yes because it has an ocean and why is it it's outside the Goldilocks zone have subsurface ocean okay I see where you're going with this it as a subsurface ocean and we found through whatever it's been now nearly 60 years of exploring planets both from ground-based observations using telescopes and our spacecraft that there are several moons in our solar system that have subsurface oceans and so they're liquid ocean liquid walked and had to be melting them it's not the Sun it's not every ocean a subsurface not not the Pacific but it isn't it sub no sub means it's under the ground think of it that way except the ground on Enceladus is ice the top of it the started cylinder on this earth okay buddy because I was like what do you think you know really it's like it's like when you have a chocolate cake the frosting is on top the cake is sub cake and then and then sometimes there's a layer of frosting yes okay do we have that we are but just to be clear Vanessa uh until recently the North the North Pole Ocean is an ocean under a layer of ice so your question was not out of nowhere I mean you can't have oceans on earth under layers of ice yeah usually able to used to be able to yeah kid can I ask a dumb question you referred to this South Pole how do we gauge north and south on a moon in space the way it's spinning no we know great Rinna hold out your right hand okay like this curl your fingers if your fingers curl in the direction of the rotating object your thumb points to the North Pole so if it's spinning like this and we know that these moons are spinning we've been there a long time we got that down if it's spinning like this then that's what he means the North Way but Venus rotates the other way so what would the north be reversed on Venus like so if anything that seems to rotate this way you take a hand do that and then the North Pole would be down okay so Venus is north pole is south of everyone else's right hand rule to establish what is north sure yeah I got that yeah so go on so okay let me finish finish this story so that's why we could all agree what is north no matter what object we're looking at well that guy doesn't agree over there all right so we're where you go so liquid water organic compounds that we know come from the ocean and it's being heated by tidal flexure okay so it's in a resonance which makes its orbit eccentric sometimes as far away from Saturn sometimes it's close and that means that the tidal forcing varies and that's how you get tidal energy injected into one of these bodies there's enough of it to keep the ocean stable and so this is what nASA has been saying for decades now would be the formal requirements that we would want to know exist in on a body so that we'd mount the next kind of wave of exploration and go there but in particularly to look for life and so that's where we are with Enceladus so the the Goldilocks zone that is so celebrated can exist in other ways outside of the traditional two Goldilocks zone there really is no Goldilocks zone as it pertains to distance from the Sun but there is a Goldilocks zone in the sense that well there is not know it just because all you need is something that sorts of people well they're not it's the Sun yeah but you ultimately need something like tidal energy how are the oceans what how warm are those oceans well we don't really know but they have to be at least you know the the temperature of liquid water like zero degrees Celsius or 32 degrees and they got it they got a pack some punch if you blow in geyser is a hundred hundred kilometers in the sky that's not hard to understand because the weight of the overlying ice shell forces the water up the cracks and then there's also volatile materials like we've seen in Japan they have special toilets that do that we want to go question about okay so if you're looking for life on that moon has anyone ever thought maybe this is very irresponsible but has anyone ever thought like well what if we just threw a bunch of bugs in there what you want to do that well just to see if they could like live and create like an animal where iam I mean we're not but wouldn't it be so cool and then you come back five years later and they've all grown up and we put this is just an idea we put enough trout that when we get there again we is that really so bad okay so so nASA has an entire office called planetary protection yeah they do and their goal is to preserve planets this would include moons that may have life from contamination of life from Earth and to preserve life on Earth from any bugs that might accidentally be brought back from our planetary mission it's called forward and backwards forward and backwards contamination those planets have that with us so why are we like they don't have an agreement so until we know that a planet is completely sterile which that we want to be really careful this episode is brought to you by curiosity stream make sure you check out Stephen Hawking's favorite places renowned physicist Stephen Hawking takes a flight of epic proportions to visit his favorite places in the universe a three-part curiosity stream original series and an Emmy winner go to curiosity stream comm slash star talk for unlimited access to the world's top documentaries and nonfiction series and for our listeners and a promo code Startalk when prompted during the signup process and your membership is completely free for the first 31 days so you are also part of the Voyager team which had messages for aliens that might find this spacecraft is on you it has escaped our solar system and so this movement to try to contact extraterrestrial life be it microbial or what we might call intelligent it's been going on for a while but some people might ask since that Voyager record a Voyager record contained data that would allow aliens to triangulate back to find out what planet in the galaxy this was launched from yes this is basically our return address right do you give strangers your email address other humans that have DNA in common with you you do I do it's on my website Cyclops org yeah yeah okay again yeah Vanessa do you know I'm just saying I'm just I'm curious about the the it's not the ethics of it but the the sensibility of alerting and we all know what aliens will do when they find humans we've seen this many times played out so so this is really tell this to Carl Sagan at the time that he put the and he and Ann Druyan put the record on the spaceship no I did not okay no I did not everyone was very hopeful everything will be peace everyone thought it was well you know it's on a spacecraft that you know is fast to us but it's going pretty slow it's not gonna get too far you know I mean it's you know but there are there are people myself included wanted to send messages into the galaxy encoded on transmissions coming from the most powerful radio dishes we have here on the earth the arecibo telescope is one Frank Drake famous astronomer radio astronomer started this in 1974 he relayed a message to m31 as a globular cluster in our galaxy actually it was a demonstration of the power of the transmitter on that telescope which they had just brought online and he and his creativity and his just exuberance and wondering about life elsewhere constructed this message that was encoded on the signals and they sent it into space very celebrated thing and I wanted to do it again except do it better and there's even a website where I describe this but suddenly there is a foot this movement of people who think that this is a terribly dangerous thing it is Stephen Hawking yeah it does it includes Elon Musk yes and they think that we are endangering the planet to let aliens know where we are we endanger ourselves when one civilization encounters another in the history of life on Earth right so the extrapolation is you know so a much more powerful advanced civilization encounters us it's going to be like humans encountering flies and they'll just want to like squish us and die you know can I say we're already doing it that's my argument that's the counter-argument what is the counter I have yet to hear counterpart and and the counter-argument is not due to me that people have been saying this for a long time now but the idea is that any civilization that is advanced enough to come knocking on our doorstep has already filtered out I mean if you've got that far it has to be benign because if it wasn't benign it would have destroyed itself so yeah can I say what my can I say what my feeling is no I just feel like even if this advanced civilization is so much more advanced that we're like ants relative to these aliens then whatever they want even if it is enslaving me I kind of feel like that would be the right thing to do anyway you know I mean if they're so smart if they think that you know I should be basically you know the coffee boy or something this is a guy who are helpful with authority figures they know everything so they must know what's right for us then and it might be squashing us they're lucky tonight is part five you're making a pro-slavery argument [Applause] but I believe you think needs coffee coffee they would come here do you think they'd stay awake on those long interstellar flights it's definitely Starbucks okay wait wait so you were saying then a sufficiently intelligent civil ensign otherwise with that technology and power if they were evil they'd be evil to each other and destroy one another as we were on the brink of a few decades ago possibly even decades to come and so fine and now you're gonna say they're so smart they have our best interest in mind well they'll have they'll know what's right better than we'll know what's right I think that they'd be so evolved literally evolved then they will have they will appreciate life because they will have studied they probably know already what's going on inside what what I was gonna ask is why don't what have we said to them and doesn't it also matter like what we say like if we're like Oh everyone's nice here you guys should stop by or if we're like we're like we really are coordinates like where we are you know we're built on DNA I mean this is what we look is it ever like a pea recipe or anything good like they could try this thing me like this is fun I wonder if they have more of that they come with a l1 paia plus if they show up and there's some appendage sticking out maybe that's not what you should shake because you don't know alien Anatomy for example I'd love to pull on an alien penis that's a sign of friendship how do we give them our coordinates and stuff just do we just think that they know our well you know you have to make certain assumption it's actually a very an all seriousness this is a very interesting fascinating intellectual exercise to go through to figure out how you would communicate with yeah an alien alien organism you have to assume they're not gonna speak English they're not gonna speak there was no some french recap if an alien landed in my backyard and things Gerard Depardieu was an angel from another world so you'd have to assume that they know the geography of the galaxy and that they know about electromagnetic radiation and all its properties and they know physics and maybe they have math to something like it because they got here I mean they had to get here from you know yeah thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of light-years away yeah right yeah they didn't just fold space on a lucky guess they probably I wonder if they know about wormholes you know like the whole contact yeah why wouldn't they I'll give wormholes I want where all so if if they know what the best we asked for a wormhole cuz tell them that you want to work home I'll let them know cuz I think you're next to make contact there so I actually left my cell phone upstairs all right so so Carolyn you are hopeful and I'm delighted to hear that you're more hopeful than I am because there's a look at how see how tribal we are human to human and somehow you're thinking we wouldn't be human tribal against aliens or vice-versa but there's no guarantee that we're gonna make it we may be one of these failed civilizations if we don't get our act together we're we we haven't we haven't passed we haven't passed the test yet so we may we may just go by way of all those civilizations that just destroyed themselves and we're not going to get to participate in the Nirvana that awaits all the peaceful well hopefully that'll be a future generation what gets me is I we they're all these outerspace treaties that the UN comes up with and peaceful use of outer space and and friendship in outer space and I'm thinking I have very little confidence in that because why would you think that on earth we'd like killing each other but in space oh that's a place to be friends you don't think Isis would be super nice on the moon I am not nice I'm not convinced that we will treat each other better in space than we do on earth until we know how to treat each other better on earth all right it's time to wrap up all this talk about death and AI when we come back we're going to take your questions on everything cosmic about the future of the human race on earth or in space on Startalk [Applause] let's go straight on in if you come from someplace other than New York I would welcome to know your point of origin sir go ahead what's your question come from ten blocks away sir ten blocks away what country is that is that so so my questions Elon Musk has been doing a lot of stuff in SpaceX on launching stuff into space but it seems like his underlying motive is really to colonize Mars to some extent and you just wanted to get kind of I guess everybody's opinion about you only get one because otherwise we'd be here all night go ahead so specifically you want a comment on on Elon Musk's plan to colonize Mars with SpaceX Sean what do you feel about colonizing Mars my understanding was that Elon wanted to get to Mars himself I don't think he cares that much about the rest of us coming along but in a lot because I think he said he'd rather die on Mars than live on earth that's what he said I and I you know I repeat I think it's it's obviously something that we should do is to send people to Mars cuz we want to study it but I don't think we should consider that any savior for the human race because again look at Arizona I mean look at the Sahara it's like we can't grow trees in the Sahara then we're not gonna be able to do much on Mars there you go thank you next question ed were you from Amos Carla I'm from an unfasten ating place also called New York okay yeah and my question is more on the social side you guys mentioned about Carl Sagan making a marketing move as far as taking images in outer space and all that what do you think is gonna take for the 21st century the quote-unquote millennial kind of generation to get interested in space and actually propel the next generation towards space exploration on that generation now do you think yeah I'm sorry oh yes so there's a next generation coming up the Millennials and those who follow them we had our sort of pale blue dot and our moon launch and our forces of Science and Technology to inspire us do you see anything on the horizon is that okay paraphrase of your question yes good thank you yeah is there anything on the horizon that you see millions well means internet cats yes this is what you guys have created for yourself Carolyn any reflections now I think the biggest thing that's going on in the planetary science community now and also at NASA is this idea that we're going to go and find life in the solar system and so it's gonna take work to do that because it's actually a pretty hard question and we got to figure out what the best way is to do it but it's not gonna happen I'm gonna be gone but probably before that great big discovery happens and they're gonna we're gonna need young people people who are young now to kind of you know carry the torch so people you know and today who were you as young as you were when you joined Voyager right so it's it's gonna happen at some point I mean there's really good reason to think we actually might find life in our solar system we just gotta just gotta you know mount the you know get going on it all right thank you my name is Zach from the smellier side of the River New Jersey across the moment yes kind of bouncing off of what you said about life within our solar system I think everyone here is in agreement that there's life in the universe and that's kind of where I'm going at in the universe as a whole coming from a you know non-religious man I am Jewish but you know talking about it's okay but you know boys - go on you James but the universe in general I was wondering what you guys think you know cuz I know when you put your head on the pillow at night you think of what is the universe and what is the functionality of it is there a greater cause is it meant for a purposes of Bill for something I just in three minutes I'd love to know what you guys think simply as fast as you could you know what you think the universe is okay so that's so this is free oh my god first to you I guess is the I I do think that there has to be life on so many different parts of the universe and so that everyone's coexisting but I don't see why we can't just go to another planet but I do think it's - like I have ever all these different species coexist do you know that you know that we might be more likely in a matrix than in a real universe do you ascribe to that philosophy I I remain convinced that if we figure out a way to make a perfect computer simulation of a world or of a universe and in that simulation there is what we would call life and that life has free will as programmed in that they could then decide that they want to make a simulation of a universe themselves and if each one of these simulations reaches a point where it makes a simulation of the universe then most universes that will exist will be simulations and if that is the case then the likelihood that we now are in a simulation compared with being the first actual universe that created the life that made the simulations is very high so I heard there are no dragons then I would be deeply intrigued I'm intrigued by that possibility that we are the playthings of a higher intelligence and every now and then they get bored so they throw in you know they stir the pot a little and they say okay Donald Trump say this today everybody and then they're watching this and they're entertained by it all beacon theatres thank you [Applause] this episode of star talk is brought to you by curiosity stream we are back on Startalk live in Beacon Theatre [Applause] search for aliens is that a good thing maybe maybe not and what impact would that should that have on our culture on our civilization and we've got a panel of fun folks to help us decode these questions I've got a friend at colleague Carolyn Porco head of the imaging team of Cassini mission to Saturn Carolyn Porco yes [Applause] I and I call it madam Saturn and you okay with that I never asked okay okay good thank you could be it could be worse perfect we've also got Sean Ono Lennon who is an artist and musician [Applause] and Eugene tell us who you brought Michael Ian Black and Vanessa Bayer all right so Carolyn some of the images that you were in charge of bringing back or or assembling creating because the field of view of the camera is not so large that you get everything you have to mosaic many of the big pictures sweeping pictures that we've seen the end of the day we're looking at shadows of the ring cast on the ball the Sun is here and and you see the the how many tiny rings make up the big ring and I'm looking at say I want this as a poster on my wall and so Sean do you see the space pictures as arc I certainly do in fact um even when I was very young I actually gave Carolyn this painting because we became friends recently and I painted Saturn and I remember realizing later on that the coloring of Saturn was artificially colored and I was so depressed I was like well what does Saturn really looked like and and that's what's so cool about Carolyn's work is that she's actually showing us more you know beautiful images of what Saturn really would look like to our eyes but I was always kind of surprised that they color them and I know it's for science and stuff you're talking about false-color pay you know it looks so so colorful Saturn but actually I realized that Carolyn's pictures are much more accurate today I follow it for sure so so Carol if you go back into the early 60s space missions no one really the scientific community didn't really want to send cameras because the pictures are you fine but there's no real data in a picture you want you want chakra quarters and and measure magnetic fields and spectral distributions and so how do you how did photography of cosmic objects rise to such a height well let me this is a very interesting little tidbit of planetary science history but in the early days of the space program Neil is right they didn't want to send cameras and it was Carl Sagan who was arguing he argued a billion times he argued for bringing along cameras on planetary missions when all the other scientists thought pictures were for PR they weren't basic science and they would just be taking up space on a spacecraft but he lost not only space but weight weight of a camera l think I need a big money budget every day so the first I think I've got this right the first planetary mission didn't have a camera but he eventually won the war and we've had cameras on spacecraft ever since but you know how did they get that reverse shot of the moon craft taking off from the moon I mean you know what I'm talking about in 1969 when they actually land on the moon there's this reverse shot where the moon lander goes back up off the moment was her cameraman sitting there like no there was a camera that was left on the lunar module that took that was left on and took up that's a pretty spectacular shot there was the camera man it was just sitting there I just was always amazed that they they got a shot of them leaving because I mean I think what ultimately happened NASA is formed as an agency first to compete with Russia the Soviet Union and to show our technological Mike and you're right the public relations wasn't so much about what you do with the science it was about here's our astronauts that the public relations was all through that lens and so later on you would learn that when you take those kinds of pictures people eat it up and it transports them into that moment and then NASA's budget becomes a little more stable and and people no matter who they are have some sensitivity and interest in continuing this adventure that's right and and but it looks that way because your mission did you like nothing else ever goes well thank you I'm glad you noticed but I you know I was on I was on the Voyager mission and believe me the Voyager was just absolutely the most magnificent romantic mission you could ever have been on you were young boundless I was young there was a time when I was young and I noticed I mean as great as it was I was noticing that you know the pictures were being processed basically to support press conferences so most of the pictures that were released to the public by the Voyager mission were put out in you know a period of about seven days around each of the flybys and they weren't there wasn't a lot of attention paid to be clear Voyager visited many planets Judy's not going to orbit around them so hence the word flyby had very high currency back then because you never hung out at the planet that you visited that sweet flyby Saturn Jupiter Uranus Neptune and each of those have this package that's what you do that's right so and there wasn't a whole lot of attention paid to how you process the images or getting the color right and so when I was made the leader of the imaging team on Cassini this was like one of my cardinal goals it's not like I could tell my fellow scientists this but I had it in my mind that I was going to make the pictures absolutely as beautiful and as natural as I could so the public would feel like they were along for the ride so and that's what we did and I'm you know really the great [Music] [Applause] Michael Vega where are the Voyager spacecraft now they're about don't call me on this but something like 16 to 17 or 18 light hours away from here had are they out of the solar system one of them Voyager 1 has crossed kind of the edge of the magnetic bubble so to speak so we can legitimately say it's an interstellar space but you can't legitimately say it's no longer under the influence of the Sun because it's got to go really really far is that the heliopause the edge of the magnetic field why isn't it called the heliopause the edge of the magnetic field of this oh yes yes it is so it went past the heliopause and they know from the character of the charged particles and the rate that they were impacted the direction they hit it and the direction and all that that it finally got to the interstellar medium hit your stove and I thought that was a I thought that just sent chills up so and long before it got there it passed Neptune the point you gorgeous you know no I'm sure uh for the pebble doc oh yeah yeah so Voyager 1 the two voyagers so Voyager 1 passed Neptune past the orbit of Neptune orbit of Neptune the last planet yes solar system and and you will leave it alone he's right he's right and they turned the camera around yes by whose prompting tell me about that okay so this was just an idea that I had as soon as I was made a team member of the Voyager imaging team which was right after I got my PhD so this was like in October of 1983 I went to work for Brad Smith who was the head of the imaging team you got your PhD if I remember correctly from Caltech Caltech in May of 1983 anyway Niki Eugene for establishing that Caltech is a good school somebody's gotta so I just thought it would be great to take a picture actually my idea was to take a picture of the solar system because I knew Voyager 1 was not going to encounter any more planets after Saturn and I had a different idea than Carl who eventually had also proposed this but I didn't know about his effort he didn't know about mine I thought wouldn't it be great to show what the solar system would look like to an alien coming in from outside that's what I wanted to do Carl at a family photo of a planet yes and Carl wanted to take a picture of the solar system too but he really was after that whole you know romantic idea of showing the earth as he didn't he hadn't coined the phrase yet pale blue dot but that was his idea and to show the picture of the earth awash in a sea of stars you know just that emphasize the loneliness the tiny mess of our planet in the hopes of engendering feelings of planetary brotherhood and so on so I I was going around Hawking it on the Voyager project in like 1984 Annie tells me his wife tells me he had started two years earlier and Riaan we both got like dull stares like you want to do what you want to take a picture of the earth it's only gonna be a pixel what are you crazy get out of here they're kind of that kind of a response and finally as the mission we're really getting near the end they slapped you know that's just my audio visual effect so finally Carl then when I say they didn't want to do it the Voyager project didn't want to do it then big guys the ones who made the decisions Carl went to NASA he went all the way to the NASA Administrator and convinced the head of NASA the head of NASA and so the people at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were directed to take this picture and that's what we did it provides it's so hard isn't there a lot of downtime I mean you just find through space can't you just say it's just turn the camera round for a second why is that so hard I think it required doing something that we hadn't done in the Voyager project and that was taped of antennae which was continuously in those days pointing to the earth and actually break communications take it off so we could use the antenna to shield the camera from the Sun or else you wouldn't be able to take this picture and then take the antenna and point it back to the earth and they were afraid they'd never get it back there so it wasn't until Voyager 1 was completely done with its mission its planetary part of the mission that they let us do this and they managed to regain communications anyway but we became the famous pale blue dot image that became the the it became almost the spiritual inspiration for the book Carl Sagan's book the pale blue dot its iconic I mean it just really people really loved it so it's just earth just barely a pixel in the image and it was not in a sea of stars but it's a sea of nothingness and that's just because the aperture of a lens if you said it for the Lightning the lighting of the earth and you're not gonna see the stars but they're there it's not like they weren't okay of course there are stars there it was ready he's trying to keep us honest keep it honest right is it your exposure matters here and you I call out I don't think there were stars there so alright so in the pale blue dot the book Carl Sagan wax poetic and philosophical and with great elegance on what our place is in space and in the universe in general upon reflecting on this pale blue dot and and but you were not happy with the pale blue dot where are you you decided to take another pale blue dot I did so what did you do so ok so I had always since the first one had it in well since I became the leader of the imaging team I had it in my mind to do that picture over again only make it better and well because you know in a proposal that Carl wrote to the project the Voyager project to request that they take this picture he wrote this is not commonly known but he wrote that the the idea was to take a picture of the earth and I quote awash in a sea of stars and as Neil said that picture didn't win didn't capture Stars and the earth was sitting on a beam of scattered light and of course none of this matters because Carl you know he was the master of romancing things and and turning the whole thing into a you of the allegory on the human condition so if his nose was bigger than the image itself right yes right it just gave him the opportunity to point out you know our cosmic circumstance so I wanted to take the picture that probably Carl would have wanted and as I was looking through the timeline of events that my colleagues were planning and I were planning for the science that we were going to collect with Cassini and I found an opportunity that wouldn't get anybody too angry and I'm not taking too much time too much resources to take this mosaic with the earth in it it occurred to me wow you know why instead of doing what everybody seems to have done since the original pale blue dot and take the picture of the and then two weeks later tell everybody hey while you aren't looking we took your picture and isn't it beautiful here it is I thought why don't we tell the people of the world ahead of time that on such-and-such a date at such-and-such a time your picture is going to be taken and go out as the window of opportunity opens and look up and think about your position on this planet and the neverending blackness of space and how unique our planet is and it's you Josh you got to step outside of their house and look up at Saturn while you took their picture I did it was the original Pokemon go [Applause] no it was it turned out to be what you had a cute name for it was it called it's called the day the earth smiled the day the Earth's because I asked everybody to go out and smile you know smile in celebration of being alive on the field who thought it was like like the biggest cosmic performance art ever so is that part I mean you're you're an artist kind of yes and but we have a scientist here talking about beautiful pictures and and engaging people and and this is not how scientists usually talk but is how an artists artists live for that sure I mean I think you know the intersection of science and art and math and art I mean I think a lot of musicians think of music for instance as a kind of audio geometry you know I mean you can easily graph pitch and time and volume you know on a graph it's chargeable and and so in a way you know melody and music could be considered a kind of audio mathematical language there's actually this quote that I want to tell you that I don't know if you've heard it is kind of a way that was way deeper than the time it took you to communicate that sigh that was just I have to pause on that so music is an audio geometry well yeah there's this quote that's relevant to this it's not I wasn't on a tangent here but yeah you know this guy James Joseph Sylvester who was the tutor for Florence Nightingale who invented nursing or modern nursing anyway yeah he's a good guy or she's a amazing woman but he has this quote that some music is the music is the mathematics of sense and mathematics is the music of Reason which i think is beautiful [Music] it was rough going Puff Daddy is the Jupiter of no I'm kidding anyway so I do you think that I mean in fact most of my I notice I mean most of my mathematically and scientifically minded friends are in professional scientists tend to be really big art fans too so there's definitely an intersection personality-wise but one of the things I was thinking about you know leading up to this show was was music was science and art actually the same kind of thing you know in Babylonian Sumerian and Egyptian times I mean what I mean by that was was there art for art's sake or did it always have a function I mean hieroglyphs were telling stories and mythologies and you know being an architect to make a pyramid you know you were a scientist and astronomy and astrology were kind of the same thing because it was all part of religion and I guess what I'm saying is I think science and art were by definition intersected until a period later on when they started to be totally separate because I feel like now art what defines art from science or anything else is that art doesn't have a function it doesn't have a purpose other than to be art so art for art's sake I mean that's why it's not math or science but but I feel like you know in da Vinci's time friends I mean this is more like a question da Vinci was a scientist and an artist did he really feel there was a huge separation between those things I don't know I based on the notebooks of his that I've looked at all right it's all the same exactly I mean he's sketching horses and studying the muscular you know patterns and the skin in fact I think I think we have some some residue of that time in our modern some of our modern referencing so for example today you would say she's got it down to a science and on the others you'd say he raised it to an art raise it to an art form and science and arts show up in those two phrases and in each of those cases we kind of mean the same thing yeah somebody has taken a craft to an extreme limit of perfection and the only way you can reference that is to say they've raised it to an or got it down to a science I want to bring this back to what started it Carolyn did the day the earth smiled and everyone got engaged in a in an activity that was symbolic and people were touched fairy by the science and I've seen lyrics that you've written and co-written that were touched by science and so you're not just an observer of what's going on it has infused who and what you are as an artist and I'm enchanted every time I learn that such a thing happens you've got it I got you what you got yeah I have a sign I was a song here called nebula boy yeah well I have a band with my girlfriend called the ghost of a saber tooth tiger it's a catchy title and we have a bunch of songs I mean I mean we're both kind of science groupies and I say where science Groovy's because if I were to say I was a science nerd that would mean I'd actually have to know facts but as a groupie I'm just kind of waiting backstage and waiting to be touched by science as it were [Applause] but yeah I don't mean you specifically Neil but you know but I'm open to it what's the title of your album it's monolith Phobos that's my model list of Phobos yes one of one of Mars Mars news well the origin of that record title which is my the most recent record I put out with a band called the delirium is I don't know if you guys have seen it but there's a there's a c-span interview with Buzz Aldrin or he says there's a monolith on Phobos and I don't know who put it there maybe God put it there but we have to go boldly forth and he kind of gets really excited and I thought it was here's a t-shirt that says get your ass to Mars exactly he's really interested but I just thought it was the most amazing interview I'd ever seen I mean I assumed it was gonna be front-page news of every newspaper but no one seems to have seen this have you guys seen that okay because it's pretty unbelievable I mean it's the second manlet who have landed on the moon telling us that there's a structure on Phobos I mean look I know he's not saying it's artificial you know about the hexagon on Saturn right sometimes I can't wait to tell him okay but the point is you're inspired by the science that's unfolding around you yeah we have a song called Schrodinger's cat which orders to roediger sky exactly and the strategic Schrodinger was a physicist yeah under mental - the birth of quantum physics as a branch of physics right but didn't he come up with the Schrodinger's cat scenario to disprove the Heisenberg uncertainty principle meaning he was making fun of it as a test there's a thought experiment he was against it as my when he wasn't for I I don't know what it was for against it but if you're smart it doesn't matter you challenge people's others or other people's thoughts right well I wouldn't know anything about that what I mean is if you if you're smart in the room you can pose a question that's either right or wrong but if it challenges other people to think more deeply than they were before that is useful whether or not it turns out the way you had intended my holidays geocentric known universe had earth in the middle everything orbiting around it and he came up with epicycles it was a whole mathematical model all turned out to be wrong [Music] fascinating it became a fascinating model to try to attack to see if you can find out why that was wrong is there an experiment that could that could falsify it and so so this is this is what led to the great insult going to insult a scientist you say your work is not right and it's not even wrong some little bits on that bird so I'm just I'm looking at your lyrics here I'm very pressed oh well I mean I'm embarrassed now to read them but I was told to so I'm going to give us just before okay so Schrodinger's cat it's so dorky isn't it so yeah we wrote this song in a I guess there's if there's a few science references in here well this is philosophical it says like a tree that falls alone in the woods without a sound I can't be sure that I exist when you're not around what would you pause when you say something deep yes yes that was beautiful it was becoming your dad again oh well yeah that's the course of Schrodinger's cat is like a tree that falls alone in the woods without a sound I can't be sure that I exist when you are not around Neal when physics math philosophy shows up in an artist's creative lair so do you think today there's more or less or what what's the trend line in The Hunger people have either for art or for science or for their marriage going forward and I say that because for example there are significant appearances of films where scientific accuracy was strongly valued yet it needed an entire room full of artists to create the visuals for the stories that we're told and that included interstellar the movie gravity especially the movie the Martian right yeah so I guess what you're saying is our people more interested in seeing art represents science accurately than they used to be in the past no I wasn't being that pedantic I just say I'm sorry it's just do you you are evidence of this are you a trend line or you an anomaly of artists I don't really answer yes you the moving frontier of science to serve just as his side as an aside Neil I'm also an art [Applause] well yeah I was gonna say I don't really have my finger necessarily on the pulse of much I mean I have my own pulse but the universe serving as the artist mu well that day you know I thought about this and and I think that what's interesting is that art until dekho I think this is true was you was always looking to nature for its inspiration I mean if you look at Art Nouveau which precedes deco everything was flowers and trees and and and naked ladies and then then something happens during the Dust Revolution when everything starts to look like machinery and it's because we stopped looking to nature for inspiration which I would say would be like looking to physics for inspiration and we started getting inspired by like cars and airplanes and guns which is why actually deca is not my favorite period it's cool but everything started to look like an airplane as opposed to like a tree you know and so I feel like that was the time in human history when we stopped really having as much reverence for for the universe and nature and and and for our mother earth because we were no longer paying attention you know you know most of the architecture in old New York is Art Deco right I mean that's I mean not as much as Florida I've seen some serious Deco cities there but you know not to not have enough issues no I don't want an honest state to just go underwater you know just just must be not your getting themselves underwater no I mean I guess I think that it's it's a double-edged sword I think as people's interest in science and their access to scientific information to the Internet is increasing there seems to also be sort of like a reverse backlash where people are trying to teach creationism in school do you see what I mean so at the same time I didn't see your cause and effect what I mean oh I didn't mean it's causal I mean it's it's interesting that there's happening at the same time so at once we're becoming more science literate as a society we're also becoming less sighs don't you think the movies can be scientifically literate movie can help my forces that operate on us in nature I just think sci-fi films which are hugely popular and they make hundreds of millions of dollars yeah they may be our only hope to ensure that we carry a scientifically literate community into the future less the absence of science literacy lead to our own extinction Niels may I ask a question about the intersection what about the reverse which also seems common in our leading to science I from what I see in my light reading of science a lot of science is inspired by our scientists are inspired by things they saw as kids like in Star Trek or Star Wars heard of that book the science or the physics of Star Trek it's kind of dorky but you know it's it's basically what is possible in Star Trek and what isn't possible is the 50th anniversary of I mean in terms of Hollywood or the media accurately representing science I mean next generation was pretty far ahead of its time in terms of trying to talk about real physics and wormholes and parallel dimensions and stuff but I remember there was this controversy where there was an episode where they went back in time there were all these likes Trekkie nerds being like well I looked at the stars in the sky in the star system I calculated wouldn't have been that position of Orion and all that stuff yeah which I just think is so funny but I mean I I just find it so funny to be really uptight about like well the plasma engine wouldn't have been this or that way but they have no problem with the fact that they're like you know in space talking to Klingon it's like that doesn't whenever I release a tachyon pulse it's pretty much like it is in psycho now I can't suspend my disbelief Orion would have been slightly to the left how am I supposed to get into this so they have no life I offend the geek averse in this moment okay so those debates that unfold unfold where actual known science has been attempted in the storytelling which is why they're not arguing about whether they can have a conversation in English with Klingons sure because that's the fantasy side where they've stepped off the the circle of science and then they made stuff up but if you're going to be if you're gonna say even have a photon torpedo let it have some resemblance to an actual photon and an actual torpedo and we're going to debate that if you're going to use a phaser that stuns you like it is it [Applause] take a breath if you can have warp drive what is the warping mechanism so you can cross the galaxy during the TV commercial speaking of which didn't they just make darn Theory posing at NASA you would probably know about this an actual plasma engine which obviously would be much slower than jet than jet fuel but that's what runs the the the enterprise is a plasma engine isn't it I died lithium principles which I also have so so this intersection of what artists do and what scientific Carolyn you you advised one of the Star Trek movies I did which one the first one start right the first one of the modern era Star Trek 2009 okay yes so the one where they're in the near Saturn hiding no yes that was my idea nice so do you want this story do a quick quick quick okay so I met JJ was at Ted we exchanged you know cards kind of you gave a TED talk I did and he heard your TED talk yes and he said I'm that he okay that's what he said okay you didn't say right then we you know went our separate ways nine months long I have to say this her TED talk somebody used her audio yeah and choreographed a little lego woman painted up to look like her and the lego person moved in lego ways giving the exact talk that Carolyn cutest thing I ever saw like carrot Porco Lego it she she's the woman who did this her name is Maya Weinstock she set up a stage a little Lego stage identical to the Ted stage it was magnificent that that is so that is did she know we could just watch the TED talk so anyway nine months later I get a phone call from someone who says JJ Abrams wants to talk to you and I said JJ who I don't I didn't watch loss I didn't really you know anyway long story short um nobody understood lost anyway even those who watched it okay so he invites me to consult on it he was very generous about he says I feel like I need to you know include you in on this I've seen your talk I'm getting all your emails about Saturn you know come join us and consult on this so I thought okay that's great and expecting we're gonna have like sessions you know in a big Hollywood office where we're going to be shooting the breeze and talking about the planetary scenes or something like really cool right so he invites me out there actually I was on a trip anyway and he says I asked him could I come up there to ball says Los Angeles and I wanted to see something being filmed I'd never seen a movie being filmed before and I was hoping I was really hoping I'd see a scene filmed on the bridge right doesn't every Star Trek fan want to see the bridge okay what I get out there and I'm watching poor Chris Pine is that his name Chris Pine get the crap kicked out of them in a bar that's the scene yeah that's pretty good it's a good scene well I'll just tell you I saw this poor guy get hit in the face fall on the floor get picked up punched again fallen it wasn't real it's but it happened like 25 times he had to go through this Lego version but what was real about how they had the enterprise on to that anyone else so so we break for lunch very unglamorous I'm sitting with Abrams I'm sitting with the head of special effects and we're just eating these very boring meals and out of nowhere he says I've got a problem and he says we've got the enterprise coming back into the solar system to save the earth and they got to figure out where to hide it it's safe so I'm thinking this is so ridiculous but he must be trying to test me right he just wants to see if I could come up with any good idea so I say the first thing that comes into my head I said well why don't you have it come out of warp drive in the atmosphere of Titan and then have it rise out of the haze and you know with the enterprise and the Rings and Saturn in the background it'll be a really groovy scene and to my surgery to my surprise those were bitching video to my surprise he says oh my god that's brilliant and that's all they ever wanted for me and they fit together [Applause] they did it you know and then all this gets to your point they sent me like the first draft of it and I pointed out lots of errors I said well you've got tightened on an inclined orbit it's not really on an inclined orbit you've got the the atmosphere doesn't look quite right and the guy who does the special effects Roger guy yet he's saying oh look don't worry about it and I said you don't understand people are gonna know I'm the science advisor on this and they're gonna plate I don't know that Titan is not on inclined orbit you've got to fix it and he wouldn't do it he just says if anybody asks you about this just tell him it was my father so what happens the movie comes out and there are blogs and blogs about what the hell did that Porco woman do and gosh titans not on an inclined whoever doesn't she know this I mean it was just pathetic that is [ __ ] - Daz John you you think deeply about the state of the world like oh no that's diabolical I can't and so you're are you optimistic or pessimistic about the role of science or art as a savior to the human race well this is actually interesting I I saw a documentary and this is gonna make sense [Laughter] okay on New York before the invention of cars and they have this problem where they couldn't take the horse manure out of the city without bringing in more horses to bring it up and it was actually a disaster whereas if you look at brownstones they're about eight steps high because they had to built they started building the buildings with high steps so you could step over the manure so it's actually a more so poop about yeah up to 30 pounds of manure a day and New York well yeah how many thousands of horses where they are in New York well that was their only form of transportation other than walking right so it does a bad design right wait so was it naturally but wait so just you said something that I had to talk so of course to move manure out of the city you need a horse-drawn carriages carrying the manure and it poopin all the way and it was a state of equal so the poop you got the same poop to take the poop out as the poop words when you started there was a poop resonance equilibrium I think is yes the resident speaker so so I mean I was looking at this and what's interesting is it was this the city was in a state of emergency they didn't know how to how to solve the problem and then suddenly I think the Model T came out and then it was just it wasn't a problem anymore so I always try to every since I saw that I thought you know that's a good metaphor for the unpredictable nature of technological innovation so I think we always have to account for that even though we're looking at our inevitable demise that maybe some scientists will come up with something smart that saves us that we can't predict ok so your solution is completely bound up in hope to just basically to just basically hope that you know you and Carolyn figure in fairness you're also counting on alien slavery yeah but having said that I did just unfortunately I probably shouldn't have but I read this book called learning to die in the Anthropocene which is by this guy Roy Scranton who who is very smart he and I learned the word Anthropocene from him I'm sure you guys knew it already but it's the human distinguished epoch so it's the it's it's the time on the planet that essentially has been affected by humans it's the epoch that's the anthro epoch and he basically says in other words all other periods in the geologic history of Earth have been marked by some natural disaster volcanoes asteroid strikes and right now if you look at the signature of what's going on on earth it is primarily that of human activity and so therefore the geologists say there's nothing else we can call this about blaming on humans and so you get the ant he's actually exactly so it's the human caused environmental impact and all that other stuff mass extinction which we are also causing and the the whole point of the book is that he was actually served he served in Iraq so he said as a soldier he had to learn to live with inevitable death that sort of you know behind each door because a soldier has to learn to to accept death and he then he also says you know people like the Dalai Lama they meditate on their death every day so his proposition is essentially that the way the human race should be able to deal with the fact that we are causing our own extinction is to just be like a soldier and just embrace death essentially thank you for that happy thought Vanessa do you do you have confidence well you know that reminded me a lot what you were saying of the finality of dinosaurs I don't know if you've seen do you remember the show dinosaurs on TGIF [Applause] what the piece I added in the finale but in the finet and the finale the dinosaurs died anyways what did you what in reality they died - no no no but it's fair but it was like a comedy show and everyone was having a great time anyway what did you you can laugh about the dinosaur sign what he yeah he's preparing himself for death what are you doing haha yeah what are you worried about a movie I think that there we should be able to just like go to another planet also grow another what good is that gonna do okay we put trout there we'll be fine if we mess up earth he'll stay here and die she's got a new planet well also like God we know that all the other things didn't do that like we're like oh they stayed here and died what if they went to like but think about it we can't even we can't even terraform Arizona I mean how are we gonna Tara phone Mars you know sean is very right about this this whole idea and let's like get with the program here we're not gonna take seven billion people and move them to Mars that's not what going into outer space we only need like twenty eight hundred of us right that's all we need you don't need a minimum amount of really fertile people excuse me so you'd read my bio I wonder if either I wonder if either aliens will come help us and save us from ourselves or whether we will invent artificial intelligence that will then solve the problems that we measly humans cannot or destroy the problems the problems the problems you don't know about problem do you need me to tell you but no no here's what the problem is we invent AI and the IAI judges that we are virus infecting the earth and we should be destroyed but that's not a real problem that's like a that's not a real problem I mean it would definitely be a problem of it for everyone but Ron would be like yeah whatever I did Carolyn they don't gotta happen that would be a real problem okay but what do you get before you get their core let's like you're a scientist look to dig deeper okay um let's dig dig I think the core of all our problems is that there's too many damn many of us that's why there's overpopulation too many what damn many of us wait wait so we just just just no terraform another planet and and we just said you're not gonna transport should we poison foreigners food yes Neil a hundred years ago and 150 years ago and 200 years ago people were worried never says mouth I know about too many people and the people would outstrip the food supply now we got the the fact that anybody is starving in the world today is not because there isn't enough food we have more food than has ever been in the history of the world it's a distribution political problems so so what are you worried about there being too many people why not innovate so that we can make as many babies as we want it's just like it feels crowded Neil well no because the population as it is and I know what you're saying what Malthusian ism is then it's kind of dark but the the we're already just you know getting rid of lions and tigers and elephants I mean these species we can't even coexist with them now yeah and human-caused environmental changes so extreme already though it may be irreversible so if there were twice as many people there'd be twice as many mopeds and cars and that's just dangerous but twice language I mean you know how much pleasure twice as many mopeds yeah is this a title worried about Belt you know you say that but in places like you know Malaysia the Philippines China they're all on mopeds never to worry we get rid of those well Lopez I had the word moped in 30 years all right so this is a real retro show it's a bitchin mopeds have you seen my [ __ ] in the church bitchin moped so yes I mean what are the problems that I worry about you said I think deeply I mean certainly environmental disaster that's human caused by the Anthropocene and I wonder also you know Elon Musk and very intelligent people it's not just a joke Carolyn they warned against super malevolent AI wall maybe not malevolent from its perspective but from our perspective certainly if it decided as you said that we were somehow expendable or some kind of virus to be rid of I mean have you heard of Rocco's basilisk Rocco's basilisk someone that person did is that is that that thing in all of Garden words all you it's a thought experiment thinking that if once AI creates itself then as Chris Val States it'll be able to infinitely improve itself in in a sort of blink of an eye it'll it'll teach itself how to be them you know the most intelligent thing at least in the solar system and at that point it will be essentially a kind of God because it will you know be almost omniscient it evolves to be the most intelligent thing imaginable then it's morality could be based on that which helped bring me about is good and that which didn't help bring me about is bad because if it had a morality it would consider itself to be the most important thing ever and so that all decisions that led towards it are good and all decisions that were not leading towards it would be bad so the people who are scared of Rochas basilisk which is the name of the AI are scared that it would figure out how to reproduce people through the DNA codons of from the past in you know doctors archives or whatever and recreate you and torture you for eternity in some kind of weird virtual hell too for not bringing it about I think the people who write smoking I was just using the magic eyes thing we're like a little scared of some science nobody you laugh there are people that take it very seriously in fact if you go on the website that the idea was first proposed it's now banned to speak about because no one wants to mention rocio's basilisk in online because it'll trace back to the person who posted it and torture them I will delete the file tonight I love the best oh wait for it what I want to do is give the last word to Carl Sagan and if we can dip do you have like a spot or something just to oh nice okay so you can take out the rest can you take out the rest turn the others off turn the house lights off yeah the housewife's thank you do you need a little jazz will end this evening with a reading from the book of Carl if you look at earth from space you see a dot that's here that's home that's us on it everyone you ever heard of every human being who ever lived out their lives the aggregate of all our joys and sufferings thousands of confident religions ideologies and economic doctrines every hunter and forager every hero and coward every creator and destroyer of civilization every King and peasant every young couple in love every hopeful child every mother and father every inventor and Explorer every teacher of morals every corrupt politician every superstar every Supreme Leader every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dye how frequent their misunderstandings how eager they are to kill one another how fervent their hatreds our posturings our imagined self-importance the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark in our obscurity in all this vastness there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves it's up to us it's been said that astronomy is a humbling and I might add character building experience to my mind there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world to me it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot the only home we've ever known Beacon Theatre thank you this episode is brought to you by curiosity stream a subscription streaming service made for those of you who have no shame in your nerd game with over 2500 DQ memories and nonfiction titles from some of the world's best filmmakers including exclusive originals get unlimited access starting at just $2.99 a month and for our audience the first 31 days are completely free if you sign up at curiosity stream comm slash Startalk and use promo code Startalk get curious with shows on everything from dark matter to dogs to dinosaurs curiosity stream is the world's first streaming service addressing our lifelong quest to learn explore and understand original content featuring Stephen Hawking Sigourney Weaver Michio Kaku David Attenborough Sylvia Earle Jane Goodall and many many more available in many platforms web app Roku Android Xbox one Smart TVs iOS chromecast Amazon fire Amazon Kindle and Apple TV make sure you check out Stephen Hawking's favorite places renowned physicist Stephen Hawking takes a flight of epic proportions to visit his favorite places in the universe a three part curiosity stream original series and an Emmy winner go to curiosity stream comm slash star talk for unlimited access to the world's top documentaries and nonfiction series and for our listeners and a promo code Startalk when prompted during the signup process and your membership is completely free for the first 31 days you

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 558,724

Rating: 4.8615494 out of 5

Keywords: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Eugene Mirman, Carolyn Porco, Sean Ono Lennon, Vanessa Bayer, Michael Ian Black, Beacon Theatre, Voyager 1, Cassini, Pluto, Saturn, Titan, Enceladus, Goldilocks zone, Saturn’s rings, moon, Earth, tidal flexure, StarTalk, Star Talk, search for life, extra-terrestrial life, universe, Carl Sagan, pale blue dot, Leonardo da Vinci, The Day the Earth Smiled, Star Trek, TED Talks, Trekkie, artificial intelligence, Schrodinger’s Cat

Id: dGI7ZYKKrrQ

Length: 101min 42sec (6102 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2019