StarTalk Podcast: Cosmic Queries – Cosmic Cauldron, with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice

[Music] this is star talk we're doing a cosmic queries edition and you know what that means i got chuck knights sir what's happening neil all right that's all right so this one again every now and then there's the bottom of the barrel oh wow we we pull out of the barrel all those that were solicited topically but then a few fall through the cracks and others just come in randomly and so this is just some brand it's like a a potpourri yes uh i think in the past we might have called it a galactic gumbo at home but we just don't have a a good term for it how about uh we'll we'll call this one cosmic cauldron cosmic cauldron yes okay let's try that a little juxtaposition uh tongue and cheek a little witchcraft reference with science and the alliteration to boot yes sorry all right so what do you have i assume you have a patreon question up front as always we start with the patreon patrons because they give us money all right let's do this yeah uh this is davis hemsath from patreon he says is there a hypothesis for the interaction of dark matter and a black hole so you know i mean yeah i mean it's just because dark matter is dark and black hole is black black don't mean all the black and the dark gotta vote together as far as we know they are completely separate and distinct and as far as we know and that actually i'm not even saying very much there because we don't know what comprises dark matter and as i've said many times it's it'd be better termed dark gravity it's something given us gravity and we don't know what it is black holes give us gravity but we know what a black hole is so there's no obvious connection between the two at all not only theoretically but observationally as well so i got nothing for you there well there doesn't look doesn't seem to be anything there there doesn't seem to be a there there you're not in the dark matter that dark matter there yeah right right wow and if you want to find out what's in the black hole you can go check it out and let me know yes go ahead anyway uh julia lychee uh huh uh-huh julia lysak from patreon says this i have an essay question for you guys an essay question that means it's compare and contrast yeah that's what's one of those there you go college essays essay questions what in your opinion is the best all-time depiction of aliens in a movie or on tv and why oh love me that okay that's so cool i i've got the answer 1958 1958 19 wait a minute with all the cgi that we have available right now that's the problem you go back to 1958 that's the there you go uh the one of steve mcqueen's earliest films if not his first film the blob oh snap the blob the blob oh my god it's so scary if that's any movie it's not snot is coming to get us so the blog one of these you know low budget uh b movies i think they were called back then in any case what was intriguing about it is uh this thing didn't have a face didn't have arms legs nose mouth shoulders fingers toes head didn't have any of the things you normally would be putting on an alien primarily because you have an actor in the alien costume and so why would a creature from another planet with no dna in common with life on earth look more like us than we do compared to other life forms on earth right here on earth right here on earth so my argument is uh what are two really different life horns humans and jellyfish and oak trees let's take those three okay that's quite the gamut that is whatever the alien is it should look more different from the three of us than we do from one another because it's coming from a completely other kind of thing so that's why the blob for me which had no spinal column it has no nothing it's got no nothing it's a blob it's a blob and another little known fact i mean it's known if you paid attention the blob was like you said was like it's not it was it was transparent colorless when it arrived on earth after it consumed its first victim for the rest of the movie it was red yeah that is nasty it became the color of the blood that's right wild it's a little it happened just one scene and then you don't think about it i think the blob is just this red thing that's right i don't really because i'm i don't think so you couldn't you couldn't defend against the blood because it would come in under the door it would do it it was coming through anything through the greats yeah of the thing yeah came into a movie theater terrorized people because that's how it got in for me that's the most um that representation of an alien has the highest sort of integrity with regard to it not looking like anything here on earth now that being said there are two movies maybe three uh three move so start with 2001 a space odyssey all right that had aliens in them you just never saw them you saw the manifestation of their intelligence okay so uh arthur c clarke and uh carl sagan was one of the advisors on that film they said just don't show aliens at all you can't imagine it right but you can put their handiwork and so that's one that did it not only that in carl sagan's novel contact which then became a movie in the late 1990s because uh uh 2001 space august was 1968. so so contact that also had aliens that you never saw well that's because hi i'm going to take the form of your father oh yes he was like i've taken this pleasing form to you so because there's no way you could actually comprehend what we really look like right exactly exactly so so these are i think this shows honesty in our ignorance by not even attempting to show them at all okay and meanwhile uh a very important movie but for me showed very little imagination was predator okay okay uh predator is this alien drops on earth and goes human hunting right it's like yeah it's what he does and it's got arnold in it and it's got some other muscle men of the 80s right in it and they fight this one alien well how tall is the alien he's about you know six feet five or he's it's not three inches tall it's not 60 stories tall it's approximately human sized right it's got feet except they're a little bigger it's got a head it's got a mouth it's got arms it carries weapons it's got a belt it's got stuff and this is an alien come on now so it really shows an absence of imagination in hollywood anytime they go down that road okay well now what do you think of alien so that's okay the sigourney weaver we were the actual alien itself who happens to be my favorite alien because i mean you know because he's he's got a mouth and a mouth okay right so if if the mouth with teeth is scary then you give him two mouths routine exactly i'm like twice as scared so it opens your mouth but there's another mouth and then another no also too the fact that um it it bled acid to me was that's just the coolest thing ever okay but it's still like had a mouth with teeth right do you realize most like most life forms on earth doesn't have teeth i think are only invertebrates yeah let me think about that you know you got to eat something you got to chew you got to chew it's not only well worms eat things but they don't have teeth well they absorb they have no they have a mouth but yeah a lot of things whales that don't have teeth that have baleen instead of teeth you know right right it filters through right right so i'm just saying this concept that you're going to make an alien and it has teeth because teeth are scary like i don't have a problem with that jolts don't try to convince me that this can you imagine if the alien tried to gum you to death [Laughter] [Music] slippers and a robe yeah all right well you know what i gotta say you make a very cogent argument for the blob that i never considered and uh you know i i'm gonna say here's how you've changed my perspective my my perspective on this i always thought that the blob was a lack of imagination really yes i always thought of it as oh okay so you guys just you couldn't think of a good monster so you just made it into a blob but but the way you explain it and i'm wondering if they actually were as thoughtful as you because if so then it's brilliant okay they'll take it they'll take it yeah if not if they're lucky that you came along well it was pre-ordained because in fact that was my birth year so we the movie and i are the same age okay right on okay cool all right here we go let's go to ryan espinoza from facebook and uh ryan a little all over the place but i'm gonna give it to you right now uh he says if the universe is technically finite how about the multiverse and the reason why i say law all over the place is first of all is there a multiverse because he has made that a fact which is not necessarily in evidence so what are your thoughts first of all on a multiverse now secondly after your thoughts on the multiverse if this universe is indeed finite would that multiverse also be finite that's the question yes that's my i i altered his question but that's your summer you summarize i summarize okay so the answer is we got to take a break come back in the next segment we'll we'll get the latest on the multiverse on star talk cosmic queries all right uh cosmic rendition cosmic cauldron edition we're back star talk cosmic queries check nice and loaded so we last left off on the multiverse and who's the questioner again and the question was ryan the questioner was ryan espinoza and he won okay if the multiverse was finite but first of all we would have to establish is there a multiverse okay so first of all before we get to the multiverse uh we don't know if the universe is infinite or finite we just don't know gotcha and i don't know if we can know for sure any more than a ship at sea looks in every direction and it sees the horizon and it doesn't see land in any direction it's in the middle of its own horizon right it cannot know how big the actual ocean is if it only has access to the water within its own horizon what it would have to do is is keep moving okay it'd have to like travel and we keep moving and take its horizon with it and then horizon moves across the water surface and then eventually they might see land at that point they have found the edge of the ocean the ocean ends because more ocean doesn't keep coming in so if we wanted to explore if the universe had some edge right then we we're not going to learn it just sitting here in the middle of our own horizon we'd have to start moving to other places within the universe and you want to do that fast otherwise it expands faster than you can get there and you'll just never know ever okay if the universe is expanding faster than you're traveling if the ocean is growing faster than the ship is sailing well yeah now you're now you're on an oceanic treadmill that's right thank you that's a perfect analogy there so we simply don't know so anytime any of my i or my colleagues reference the size of the universe or the um the dimensions it's basically the the observable universe the universe that's within our horizon we can give you the size of that and how long we've been at that beyond that we don't know now the multiverse it turns out the multiverse is on good theoretical grounds so we didn't just pull that one out of some orifice right it's it's quantum physics mixed with general relativity two highly successful uh understandings of the universe when you shotgun marry them in the early universe because quantum physics is the physics of the small and general relativity is the physics of the large but the early universe the large was small right so if a large was small then perhaps the quantum influenced the entire universe so when you have particles popping in and out of existence or doing weird things maybe that particle is an entire universe unto itself if the universe is the size of a particle so you can take that kind of reasoning that comes from that direction and on in doing so you can conclude that maybe we are not alone that our universe is not alone in a multiverse possibly an infinite number of universes to reckon so by the way depending on what level multiverse we're talking about the universe can just have different configurations of atoms and energy or even the same configuration now chuck you have a goatee in this universe that means you're the evil chuck right exactly there's another universe where there's a clean shaven chuck that's the good chocolate i think he's faking it so that's one class of multiverse but there are other classes of multiverse um i've first seen explicated by um a friend and colleague max tegmark up at mit he's written extensively on this there are other levels of multiverse another one where okay your the matter and energy uh not only that can be different but the initial conditions are different so maybe your universe won't expand forever maybe it will recollapse then there's another level where the laws of physics are different all right this this is how deep into the rabbit hole you drop right before you hatch out another universe what what control do you have over the laws of physics in the traditional multiverse that people think about we are in the same space time just different pockets that cannot interact with each other as is different ships at sea would be they're on the same ocean but they don't interact with each other because their horizons are are separate and distinct so that's the traditional multiverse that people think about and talk about and has been represented in science fiction so just because we might be finite or or open or flat doesn't mean others have to be because their matter and energy could be distributed differently so there you go wow that's uh that's fascinating stuff that is by the way people say well if there's an infinite number of universes and then there's you in another universe therefore you can in principle live forever but no that other that other yet it's not me right it ain't me that's not me it's just just as much as you care about him he cares about you see that's the problem and i've said we've done this experiment before with with copies of each other and it's called twins right twins are identical copies and they walk among us right came from the same single cell i mean the same thing yourself if you pinch one twin the other twin doesn't say ouch right so they're not the same person even if they're molecularly identical so that's why i'm i'm not thinking that this other person in another universe is going to grant me um eternal life i don't see that i don't think it i don't i don't think it's good evidence or reasoning to argue that way wow cool well yeah that's thanks ryan appreciate the question man um here's michael scarn from facebook and michael says the faster you travel the slower time is for you how much younger do career pilots stay being if they fly and travel uh fast faster than common people so if you're constantly spending time at let's call it supersonic speed uh is there any negligible time just i mean time um you can always calculate how much younger they are relative to their twin on earth you can always do that by the way we've done this experiment there is a twin astronaut who went into orbit and stayed there for a year or so and left the other one on earth and we studied we i mean the nasa medical right professionals studied any differences in their dna exposure to space radiation and there is this factor because it's going in orbit you're going much much faster than a fighter pilot would ever right go yeah you're going in in fact in orbit you're going if you were to travel that through the air it'd be like mach 30 or 40. um and then firepox is going mach 2 at most mach 3 right so if you're really you know really booking it so you can calculate you just plug that into an equation and when you do that and i did this for it's it's the um the twin brothers that went into space by the way this is not a special calculation anybody with rudimentary knowledge of einstein's special theory of relativity can calculate this right okay what i mean by rudimentary is it's like the first equations you learn in relativity 101. okay yeah too bad i didn't too bad i didn't take that in in school relatively 101. you know uh so and i i don't remember i might have come up with like a hundredth of a second or something uh for being at those high speeds for a year relative to his twin so we don't measure deaths with that time precision so for me to say he will live 100 seconds longer than his twin on earth that's not a meaningful time difference so you have to be traveling much much faster than just mock dozens you'd have to be traveling a major fraction of the speed of light and do that for a suspended sustained period of time then you come back days years decades younger than your twin would have aged that'd be cool see yeah so fighter probably forget about it right so forget about it yeah uh yeah forget about okay so all right well there you go uh michael it's a hundredth of a second so enjoy that um all right this is uh let's keep it simple here because i like this question some since we since we're getting into the questions that we don't normally ever get to right i might as well get to those really like weird questions this is ralph tsuchi and ralph from facebook says if you were to get a spaced theme tattoo what would it be no i don't have any tattoos okay so i'm just you know i'm not the generation where the only two kinds of people ever got tattoos and it was bikers and sailors right right that's right popeye popeye had a sale too right yes is there any voice you can't mention so papi had a like i think it was an anchor uh yeah right on his forearms right right his bloated forearms so i thought he had some kind of arm disease or something yeah probably elephantitis yeah i know something right right so um so i'm just not a tattoo guy primarily because there's nothing i have that much confidence in really i want to look at eternally until i die i i want to be always be able to have a thought that's different from a thought i had before and therefore you don't lock in the previous thought you continue to put in new tap roots now i said this to someone who had a lot of tattoos oh no no my body is just the record of those thoughts right well they that's right okay that's one way to look to to look at it i said i could write down the record that's another way i can do it i have paper for that uh so if i were to get one maybe it would be one of these sort of uh bullet-shaped uh rockets from the 1950s you know with the fins oh yeah how the you know just kind of it's it's classically imagined right i should say yeah that's not how a comic book version of a rocket but from the day no one would draw that today right and just because it was it's it's comes from a time when we had very high hopes and expectations yes that our energy and investments would continue into um space and be sustained in ways that we have not lived up so that would be a that's how i think about it all right actually it's kind of a cool tattoo all right i'll give it i thought you were going to be like you know saturn or something like that oh no no i could look at pictures of saturn which would look better than any tattoo that would ever land end up i mean this is true this is true yeah okay all right let's go to okay uh keeping with the same theme of the the stuff we never asked okay uh this is megu31 and instagram if you can time travel uh what's the one place uh you'll go and the one person you'll see so i assume they mean backwards trying to uh yeah yeah okay so there's a there's an old joke about that right oh yeah so so consider the two facts uh if backward time travel were possible wouldn't we have met such a person by now if wait if backward time happened was wouldn't we have met such a person by now what person a backwards time traveler oh yeah yeah they should have come here to us all right they should have said but but you know the the whole um the prime directive of time travel is that you're not a little captain kirk yeah it's that you're not allowed to upset the timeline in any way and you're not allowed to tell anybody you're a time traveler oh that's how they hide among us oh forgot about that right well okay so one of my favorite was it during the science march on washington shortly after trump was elected president there's a science march just in praise of science and one of the placards said they started a chant what do we want a time machine when do we want it it doesn't matter right that's it i like that isn't that good it doesn't matter it doesn't matter whenever you get it we'll move back to whatever we want exactly all right so uh if i could move back in time i i would go back and have a conversation with isaac newton okay so now that we know that uh and that's that's well and he lived you know i have to go back to uh 16. late 1600s the year 1700 would work okay he had already discovered his laws of optics gravity and calculus and laws of optics are still getting assembled he discovered them but he hadn't published it yet and i'd bring some of our problems let's see no now now okay so this is fascinating to me right now all right i don't know how much time we got but i got to jump into this for a second so here you are you're back 1700. talking to uh uh uh isaac newton now you know everything that he's already done yes isn't that interesting but he doesn't you also know things that he would find wondrous yes how do you have a conversation what do you talk about when we come back you might end up screwing everything up when we come back details of my conversation with isaac newton that i may or may not have already had on star talk we're back start talking cosmic queries of course chuck is sitting right there because and you're here because you named this one this because this is a potpourri but you're not you're not happy with popularity no we went with the cosmic cauldron cosmic cauldron yeah i was thinking cosmic crucible but that's not right i like the crucible that's even no you burn stuff that's very alchemic it is yes exactly we have the alchemy the cosmic alchemy we're putting this stuff in the crucible and burning away the bad and leaving only what we need so we we left off uh with the question about who who would i meet or what what would i witness if i could go back in time and definitely i'm going to meet isaac newton year 1700 is as good as any uh in his late in his middle years and but you posed an interesting point right like this stuff that i know because i'm trained in physics that he's already discovered that's right but then there's stuff i know that he has he hasn't figured out yet right and he and he will figure it out okay so now i just this is everything you could screw it all up just disturb the space-time continuum yes it reminds me of my fate one of my favorite episodes of the simpsons which has been on tv for so the simpsons okay it really does homer simpson uh somehow turns a toaster into a time machine and every time he goes back in time and comes back there's something different because he keeps disturbing the continuum and oh he disrupts what the flow of time right okay and one time all he did was step on a bug and then he comes back and everybody's a lizard person i gotta find that episode it's very funny and then he comes back and um everything looks uh the same except it's super boring or something like that and he's like oh i got to get out of here and it goes and right after he leaves it starts raining doughnuts [Laughter] so that toaster is actually access to the multiverse yes that's what's really going on there so here's here's an interesting uh issue it's a time travel issue and it has to do with what are called gin particles in this particular example it would be a gin concept so a gin particle spell it's jin is the is how you it is something that was never created nor destroyed it just exists nice okay so let's in the more classic movie classic example let's go to back to the future okay right and back to the future marty at the school prom right gets a hold of the guitar right and then he starts imitating chuck berry okay but marion barry is the bandleader chuck berry's brother marion barry hears this tune and say chuck here's the tune you've always been trying to figure out what would work and he puts the phone up to the thing and he hears marty that's joe okay and so now if we follow that through what we are led to believe is that chuck berry got his most brilliant song from a white one yeah exactly not from michael j fox no but what happens is so if he does actually get it from michael j fox and he then influences michael j fox in the future then this song only exists in this loop it was never written by anybody right do you see what i'm saying oh yeah that's the only way it could exist it was never written by anybody it was never written right because uh marty plays it because he heard it sung by chuck berry chuck berry hears it for the first time through his brother's putting the phone out on the thing and then chuck berry includes it in his right in his performance as well as the the the duck walk the duck walk so so in the case with isaac newton it would be interesting if newton is on some calculation and he's struggling i say hey have you thought about if you considered right hey isaac isaacs i don't i just carried the two just carried the two isaac they forgot to carry it forgot to carry the two and so there i am helping isaac and then of course he's remembered for doing it but i only know it because i read that he had done it and so again that would be something that's closed in a time in a time in a time loop basically that never had a beginning or an end so it's just an interesting little fact about that i love that the gin particle nice yeah yeah yeah it's a gin concept so for example in the movie the lesser scene movie but it's a slow romantic uh uh not a rom-com but what do you call them if it's just a romantic romantic movie okay that's a romantic movie it was called somewhere in time a love story somewhere in time it's a love story it was a love story and i think i told this that some other occasion yeah you told me i know i i think where an old woman comes up to the main character who happens to be christopher reeve who played superman no he didn't we never talked about this we never talked about this and she comes up to him he's a professor and he she gives him a locket and says come to me oh no we never talked about that and he finds out that she come to she's back in time like the 1920s or 1930s and he does research on this and finds out that this woman exists at another time and he goes to a physics professor and uh colleague and says there anyway go back in time so we'll try this and do this he goes back in time and he brings this locket with him and he does meet her and they do fall in love and as a gift of his love for her he gives her this locket well he didn't love her that much that was her locket [Laughter] he didn't spend the time because that in that case that's a gin particle where the locket was never created or destroyed and it doesn't exist before it appeared and it doesn't exist after it only exists within that time it's locked in time between when she gave it to him and when he gave it to her interesting at an earlier point yeah so that do you have to just watch out for that yeah so now what do you what do you ask him what do you say to newton i say please help so i got a problem yeah the problem is there's a lot we take for granted not just i but any of us living in the year 20 in the 21st century we just take for granted that we understand energy which was a poorly uh uh formulated concept in his day so he wouldn't even know what you're talking about how'd you get i took a car what's a car it's a horse-drawn carriage without the horse well how did it move through chemical energy well what's chemical energy well he'd be a fast study yeah but i have to invest a lot of time catching him up on things that we just live with i don't like this i don't like this here's what that's because he's your hero yeah he's the guy that you love yeah he's got a beautiful mind yeah and after you talk to him for an hour you're gonna be like listen dumbass [Laughter] newton i don't like this i don't like it okay that could upset my hero the hero worship right anyway so that's what i would do all right there you go here we go all right what else you got let's go to austin media austin c media from instagram says hello my name is austin and i live in upstate new york i work in the aerospace industry and i build giant hyper rockets my question is based on rocket telemetry as the earth rotates to east as we launch rockets to east uh and use the earth's gravity to help it get into orbit does the amount of gravity assist come from just the overall mass of the earth and its speed of rotation or does the mass of our iron core help with the amount of speed of the rotation in relation to the amount of gravity we feel so okay it's got nothing to do with any of that okay there you go that ain't got nothing to do with any of that it's much austin we're going to treat you like isaac newton right now no that's a rocket scientist overthinking the problem right okay okay is it possible to think too much just just rain that in a little bit let that break brain calm down just calm just just just take a cleansing breath okay so uh clearly he knows and others might not know that it is our preference our anyone who's launching rockets to launch east okay because earth is rotating west to east so you get assist and you're getting a little it's not a gravity so it's not a gravity it's just getting it's a pure speed it's a push a little speed assist a tailwind that's a tailwind a little tailwind for the rocket so and and as such if you want the maximum uh extra boost you want to do it where earth is actually moving the fastest obviously earth is spinning as one solid object but at the equator it does one full turn in the same time it does uh closer to the pull but it's got a bigger distance to travel it's therefore moving faster you look at the equator it's going about a thousand miles an hour we're here in new york city we're moving about 800 miles an hour due east so generally you want to launch as far south as possible they have some mobile launch platforms that go pick up your rocket go to the equator and then launch it from the equator it's kind of cool wow nice um it's a business it's a business model so anyhow if you do that then you don't need the fuel necessary to have gapped that extra uh speed boost that you got so it's a matter of safe if you say fuel now i have more payload capacity for the thing you're paying me to put into orbit so everything is better okay if you if you can take less fuel right and it's not that much less fuel but it's enough you can make incremental differences in your profit margins right that's all it's got nothing to do with the core it's got nothing to do with how strong earth's gravity is um that's extra speed is just this whiplash effect that's the rotation itself that's that's all it is and the speed with which you have to attain so that you can maintain orbit that depends on earth's gravity and for earth it's about five miles per second if you go a little less than five miles per second you'll go up and then crash back down all right so you want to go fast enough so that your eastern motion it you want to go so fast that as you fall back to earth earth's curves away from you so for every five five feet let's say you fall towards earth you move so far downstream that earth's curved shape has curved five feet away from you so you're constantly falling towards earth at a speed where earth is exactly curving away from you that is the orbital speed and for earth it's 18 000 miles an hour comes out to about five miles per second wow there you go that's so cool there you go nice ah absolutely all right gate philosophy i've been in the house with my kids for a long time that sounds really good man sending them are you you can make it a game he wants to go into orbit today it's a dealer's choice as far as i'm concerned all right uh we are running out of time so let's get to kobe from youtube how come we're running out of time i'm talking too much damn okay go on it's okay uh does light ever cease to move can a photon be in a state of momentumless relax or does it continue to move indefinitely um so i guess he has to be talking about in the vacuum of space because we know that photons cease to move you know when they hit your eye right there they're not photons anymore right they're not they become pockets of energy electrochemical energy right in your head all right so uh photons we can slow them down anytime you put them in a transparent denser medium they go slower so they go slower going from vacuum to air it goes slower going from air to water it goes slower going from water to glass it goes slower going from glass to diamond okay diamond uh uh light travels 40 of its peak speed in a vacuum wow okay so now there have been some experiments where they created a medium where the light is really really slow like you could practically watch it move from one point to the other right so what you're doing is they're boosting what's called the index of refraction the higher the index refraction the greater the light will bend as it crosses into that medium and the slower it will move okay that's why diamonds are so useful as rings because you put facets in it and the light goes in it bends so severely that you can have you can trap light enough so that it comes out a completely different place from where the white light went in so it gives the diamond uh the appearance of having a certain radiance right right if it only gave light in the direction you sent it in then that's it's because i have the light right all right but if light comes here and it goes out there and you see it from that direction it gives you the impression of something highly radiant so diamonds have value for that reason uh among others but uh for as jewelry their value for that reason so all i'm saying is uh in principle you can have the index refraction so high that you can like watch the lights sort of move but i don't know that you can just stop it i don't think so so no frozen light i don't think so damn because that might be so cool frozen light i don't mind i don't mind the molasses light either that's kind of cool that's kind of cool too in fact there's a laboratory caltech that specializes in high-speed photography and they have some camera that takes like a trillion frames per second and then they put light through a medium that slowed it down and then they you can take all these frames per second you can actually watch the light move that's amazing right right that's good i don't think you can stop it that in fact let me put let me say it another way i don't want to be around if you succeed i don't know what oh that's funny time for one quick question what what what do you got okay quick question all right all right okay here you go this would be very quick daniel 220 from youtube says if aliens are real what technology can we suggest that they have in other words what what technology do you think they would have example like a dyson sphere uh is there anything that is there anything that we first of all if they can get to us thank you that's that's the jig's up i mean if they could get here because i mean it's not like we can't see what's around us we know how close stuff is right here's the thing here's the thing i wield things in my back pocket that would have me burned at the stake 20 years ago for sorcery in our own in our own civilization okay if you if you've had the smartphone in like the 1990s right is that oh wait a minute let me do these 19 other things people would look at you what is that and that's just us in our own technology in our own time that's funny now you want an alien who got here from another planet from another galaxy and you want to say do they have a dyson sphere if all you come up with is stuff we've thought of that they might have that's not creative enough right okay because everything they do is going to be more interesting than anything we can ever think of because we're doing stuff today that's more interesting than we even invented right you look at the movie 2001. uh back then computers were getting uh more powerful so that the the the but because that was 1968 imagining the year 2001. so computers were just coming around you see computers and they get big and powerful so in 2001 they'll be really big right they'll be huge they'll be huge and no one is imagining that you'll be carrying computers with you right they're not carrying a computer but they're trying to imagine the future all i'm saying is we we can barely imagine our own future with the technology sitting in front of us much less predict what kind of technology the aliens are going to have but if i had to go there i'd say yeah they got warp drives and they can do what the hell they want there you go that's it that's because that's what we want they have wardrobes and we want that yeah it's funny you say that to a joke where i say if you had an iphone and you went back in time just 300 years they would have burned you at the stake for witchcraft unless you were a man in which case they would have worshipped you as a god or if you go back to slavery times wait black holes aren't supposed to be that smart you know i'll kill that one that's a bad example absolutely all right that's another cosmic queries these are fun thanks for just being a part of it thank you yeah yeah definitely all right this is uh cosmic aquarius star talk neil degrasse tyson chuck nice we're all here for you [Music] you

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 282,270

Rating: 4.9026346 out of 5

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, Chuck Nice, dark matter, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Contact, The Blob, Alien, universe, quantum physics, general relativity, time travel, casual loops, Earth’s gravity, light, high-speed cameras, alien civilizations, smartphone

Id: asqyBgj7OTA

Length: 45min 54sec (2754 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020