StarTalk Podcast: Cosmic Queries – Cosmic Grab Bag

this is star talk it's cosmic queries edition chuck nice what's happening you're always there for me that's right my friend that's right i'm glad you'd like learning because otherwise this would be a really crappy job for you well uh i i'm glad i like learning too for for reasons other than just even this yes i think it's great your mama would be proud the school teacher that she was that's right that's right yeah exactly maybe that's where i get it from you know there you go it's very cool so with cosmic queries and occasionally you know the bag of cosmic queries collects and sometimes they don't fit into categories so we've made a category called no category i like that okay cosmic queries no category no cat beyond description yes so all right we'll see we'll see what we got yeah we'll just pull them out so this is you know all right here we go let's uh let's get to uh we've got some patreon members always up front with patreon thank you for your money guys we appreciate you that's patreon patrons victor sanchez says all right knowing that dark gravity is out there but we don't know how it got there could it be the dark gravity is the residual energy from a dead black hole as stephen hawking had a theory that black holes do eventually die after a very very very long time and that's the end of that question but that's an interesting question who asked that that was uh victor sanchez okay very good very interesting question i think we've had gun questions from him before yes we have yeah there's a regular and clearly he's he's literate no knowing that black holes evaporate yeah and and he did some name drops stephen hawking yes and the hawking radiation and the whole deal right you know let me just remind people or alert you if you've never known that black holes evaporate all evidence all theoretical evidence points to the fact that they evaporate and the way this happens is the energy of their gravitational field is so high that it spontaneously creates matter out of it that's right unbelievable yeah yeah yeah yeah energy and matter on the opposite sides of that equation equals m c squared so if so matter can become energy energy can become matter that's how that works and that's the recipe if you're going to make that happen in your kitchen so at the just outside the event horizon of a black hole what you can make is spontaneously fabricate particles from that energy field and when you make particles out of energy you make a particle and an anti-particle right that's the rule that's just how that that's how the universe rolls and they fly in opposite directions okay so one falls back into the black hole the other escapes it turns out that when the black hole loses energy from its gravitational field it's the same thing as it having lost mass same thing wow so in fact the black hole weighs a little less for this and this just keeps going it's very slow and it's not very efficient take a long time but eventually the entire black hole dissipates back into space and it only takes 3 trillion years actually a little longer really wow well the black holes in the centers of galaxies if you run the math on those it'll it'll take about a google years oh my god yeah yeah yeah very long time that's a long long okay yeah so so there's in fact there's a long tradition of those interested in my field to look in the very distant future of the universe so uh there's a colleague of mine who wrote a book the five ages of the universe and his last name is adams you can look it up and he uh in it there's the age of like stars okay fine all right well is what is another age well when all the stars are dead and all you have are black holes then the only energy coming out is the black hole evaporation right then you have this era of just black holes evaporating all right but that's a way long in the future and that takes a really long time but nothing else is happening so you get to label it by that according to what the primary thing that's going on over that time so relative to that period in the universe the age of stars is just a blip so so anyhow so the question was could the dark energy the dark gravity be sort of the spirit energy left over in the field of a black hole that's right i think that's the question and the answer is no okay okay and there you go stephen thanks for playing the answer is no so no here's the thing it's the if you run the history of the universe back whatever it is that is the dark gravity the dark the the dark matter whatever that is it cannot physically interact with ordinary matter because if it did it would completely change what the universe looked like so it has to have gravity and not interact with us and a black hole does both does interact with sorry black hole has gravity right but the particles that evaporate out of it we interact with those particles those are like it's regular matter that comes out so no so you can't you can't appeal to black holes for that yeah exactly sorry um yeah you actually you can't appeal to a black hole for anything you can try they're so unreasonable it's just like bro bro why do you got to take everything you're such a taker such an ugly reason with you know i should i should tweet that reason with a black hole cannot reason with a black hole all right so um basically this is just out of curiosity based on what you just said so now um since we cannot interact with it and it does have gravity so this is this force is it possible that this force well just i want to be clear that you can interact with this stuff gravitationally right exactly there that's right but the this whole other level of interaction that i'm talking about is why we even exist it's the fact that the material can come together and make atoms and molecules and that's why you're this physical thing that i can touch and you're you're a physical entity that is matter collected doing other interesting things as a collected unit dark what we call dark matter or dark gravity has no such properties right because we right and that's why we don't know what it is because it doesn't have those correct we don't we don't know what it is because it doesn't interact with light or or the energy or electromagnetic forces right so now is it possible then that it's kind of a platform that predates all of us and when i say all of us i mean the universe uh yes well it's there for it was there from the beginning right so i don't know that it predates us but it co-dates us okay and it is and we here's a way to say it its presence shaped what matter did afterwards so in that sense it pre it it's it pre-organized us organized yeah wow wow so so here it is so it's it'd be like looking at an ocean at night at like late twilight and you see sort of the white caps on the on this like maybe it's a gently moonlit night if all you could see are the white caps you say oh the ocean is just these little white caps and then the sunrise is like there's a whole ocean there right okay and you realize that white caps are just these little it's evidence of there being water but it is a small fraction of the total water that's there so we spent our whole lives finding galaxies in the universe thinking that that was the material representation of matter in the cosmos turns out no these are the galaxies are found where dark matter has collected them right there it is ah so so in some galaxy clusters there's a hundred a thousand times more dark matter than regular matter right wow so so we we are the froth on the waves oh man god can't we just can't we be can we be the foam in a cappuccino i don't want to be i don't want to be the frog little wavy if an italian had come up with it then maybe that's what they that's what it might have been cool all right hey victor great question my friend was that song from was it the 1970s all we are is dust in the water we are it's dust in the wind all we are is froth on the in the way i'm so glad they didn't write this off that way all we are is froth in the waves all right here we go or white caps no no that would that was all white caps in the open ocean okay and i like dust in the wind a little better okay i'm gonna cut with dust because we had a beautiful tune with it but yeah yeah that's what you need you need actually that's what you need now is a melody all right yeah all right how about uh glenn from glenn glenn glenn's like cher glenn does not need a last name he's just glenn it's just glenn all right the problem is there's a zillion glenn's out there [Laughter] i feel bad if your name is sharon you got to have a last name all right so uh glenn says how can we tell when an area is obscured by a black hole or whether it's just an empty area of space how much of our view of the night sky is obscured by objects such as a black hole so all right so so so space is mostly empty wow okay i think we said on a previous broadcast i gave the example of how empty space oh my god and it's it's it's mind-boggling you ready mind-boggling you look at a sentence printed on a page and then the sentence ends with a period right i think in europe they call it a full stop but there it is a period if the sun were the size of that period then and everything shrunk to match that match data the next closest star is four miles away that's unbelievable yeah i mean seriously every time i get that right so when you i mean you got to imagine that scale and the distance of four miles because we all know what four miles is well we all know and we all know what a single kilometers right and we all know how small a period here it is right so so what i'm saying is as you look out into space your sight line is not accidentally bumping into anything okay it looks like the knight is filled with stars because you're you're finding the stars to look at if you just close your eyes and like through a dart it would just go here hit the enough inverse yeah hit nothing wow the all air all space space so so no the space is not crowded so that things are blocking your view what you know sorry you know it does block your views huge gas clouds they block your view right because they're huge the manifold time is larger than the solar system whole star clusters are formed out of such gas clouds right so you know they're huge and radio waves pass right through them which is why radio waves is the band of choice for aliens if you want to talk to aliens or you want to hear what message they have they probably know if they're smart that radio waves pass through all the obscuring dust and gas in the galaxy so you would use that if you used visible light then it would just get absorbed or scattered and you wouldn't be able to communicate so radio waves we'll go through but ordinary light visible light no so guest house can block your view in fact the milky way at night there are these dark lanes and people thought oh that's where they're 100 years ago oh that's where there are no stars maybe we see through the galaxy to the rest of the universe no they're dark clouds that are actually obscuring your view from what's behind it and that took a long while to figure out wow consider this in australia the the native aborigines and like everybody else in the world they had cosmic lore about what they see in the night sky and to them they identified not the brighter areas of the milky way but the dark areas they gave meaning to the absence of light wow rather than to the presence of light and in fact one of the largest dark lanes is called the great emu in the sky very very local uh fauna yeah uh and if you look at it it's like yeah it's got a tall neck and it's got a beak area so it's an emu so just it's an interesting distinction between a western concept that something has to give you light for it to exist as a thing and in australia where the absence of light was the thing itself so so they're working in negative spaces yes as the as the designers would say yeah so so now how would you know a black hole is there because it's completely distorting all the imagery surrounding it right because it the fabric of space and time doesn't send light in straight lines it curves and you will see this so if you if you travel through space and all of a sudden your images start taking these circular distorted patterns back to hell right exactly that's a detour sign that's the that's the detour sign of the cosmos there you go get the hell out of that out of the bath so yes you would know black holes if they were in front of you cool all right so let's move on uh let's take one more patreon patron this is travis mansfield and he says do you think spacex is just a front to a larger armageddon conspiracy like maybe we already know that a huge asteroid is going to hit earth and uh and this is our only hope uh i'm not authorized to comment on that next next question all right chuck we've got to wrap it up but that's a really good question and see what i did there i'm making it wait a little teaser a little teaser commercial yeah yeah yeah so when we come back more cosmic queries galactic edition we're going to talk about i'm going to touch on conspiracy theories when we return we're back cosmic queries galactic gumbo edition which is a category unto itself that questions are completely random out of this bag uh so we left off with a cliffhanger on conspiracy theories so chuck j read the whole question again we're on the same page here go okay cool travis mansfield do you think spacex is just a front for a larger armageddon conspiracy like maybe we already know that a huge asteroid will hit the earth and uh martian colonization is our only hope boom so here's the thing here's the thing uh as you know we upload billions of photos and videos to the internet every day let's just start there okay second a conspiracy requires many people participating in a lie on a level where the temptation to let others know is somehow removed from people's behavior and so i and it would require the government to successfully pull this off and anyone who's worked for the government knows how inept they are at keeping secrets yeah or doing anything organized at such a level right so i think the urge to want to believe that conspiracies are driving everything that's happening around us needs a deeper psychological explanation that we don't currently have okay so ask the psychologist why you want to believe there's a conspiracy that's that's really what we should doing here not asking i think there's a conspiracy convince me that it isn't why do i think there's a conspiracy is the real question that's the question that's it exactly uh so travis there's your answer um we're going to send you the number of several therapists and um have at it my friend have at it uh there's a there's a there's a couple there's a couple tele-dialers in there yeah there's a couple that you could do through tele like you know zoom and it's it's listen it's a good thing my friend it's a good thing so at some point you have to ask why don't you completely flesh out the conspiracy just put in all the details you need okay it would mean the government has discovered an asteroid that's going to destroy us all right and they're keeping that a secret and everyone else in the world who has a telescope who can detect it somehow is missing it but only the government caught it right then the government is putting in a is secretly negotiating with spacex to build spaceships that we can then an arc basically to collect maybe two by two of only the chosen ones in the world so they can go to mars as we terraform mars because we've been practicing this with the the air the contrails of airplanes for the last several decades so all of this comes together now just think that through and how many people that involves and how many people would have to keep that a secret okay just put all that together and then ask yourself is that viable and feasible is isn't it easier that just tell us is it easier to just tell us we're gonna die no no no no isn't it just a simpler explanation to say no the government doesn't have this kind of secret information about the night sky because anyone else could then have access to it and there's no way they can keep that a secret on top of that we just have someone as a modern-day thomas edison and he's building and inventing stuff exactly and it's great and we all look forward to whatever the next and he's very transparent about his successes and his failures whole youtube compilations of his rockets that blew up on the launch pad that's so true none of this sounds like a secret to me that's all okay you know what that's um that was an extremely salient and thoughtful answer to this question because you know see and this is why you're an educator because me i'm just like man shut up let's go but and i don't mean that to you travis i'm not talking about the points a little more patience yeah i'm not as patient as what i'm saying you know like come on and let's you know but but no that i think that's i think it's good that people heard you kind of walk through because what you just said is applicable to any conspiracy that you might subscribe to correct and my favorite version of these is i think i saw it in a meme but i can i'll just retell it so neil armstrong and buzz aldrin of apollo 11 fame agreed to fake the moon landing but they really wanted to be as authentic looking as possible and urged nasa to do it on location and nasa agreed [Laughter] oh my god that's insane i love it so so there you have it okay hi chuck next question all righty let's go to belt fed joe belt fed yes okay belt fed joe from tucson arizona i don't even know what that means i don't either but uh apparently beltfed does apparently where's mama did yeah somebody somebody knows the deal and uh not us yet and he says uh that astron uh arizona is the astronomy mecca now i thought it was new mexico neil but he says it's arizona is there an astronomy mecca uh yeah i would say hawaii but um okay yeah yeah because they have a 14 000 foot mountain uh the big island where you're above clouds and we have telescopes there and okay uh yeah so if there was is that is that if i have to pick a state where you say the most significant astronomy happened right arizona would be maybe a close second close second here's arizona's claim to fame go ahead ready okay in tucson arizona right the nearest town to nearest uh important city to an observatory called kitt peak okay they have a relationship kitt peak observatory and tucson kid peek said in order for us to continue to do our science you can't keep making your city brighter at night because you'll interfere with our observations so let's work together to reduce the nighttime illumination because it creates a sky glow and interferes with your ability to see the stars at night so they got together and all the street lights have these sort of caps on them so the light only points downward and the and by the way if it only points downward you don't need half the wattage you previously had to illuminate the sky think about it if you're flying over a city in an airplane and you see a street light somebody is paying to have that street light send photons to you in the sky in your seat in the airplane what the hell good is that so this is very sensible recommendations which saves the town money saves the astronomical dark skies and this set of audience ordinances the dark sky ordinances have been copied by many other cities around the world well there you go belt fed joe you uh you may not be the astronomical mecca but you certainly are super important that's cool yes and new mexico also has a quite a fun suite of telescopes right so as and so both together i would say and why because there's a lot of desert climate within them and you don't put a telescope in a rain forest right you put it where there's no clouds or a minimum of clouds and new mexico arizona southern california uh satisfy that okay all right so this is what he says are the sizes masses of planets proportional to the distance between planets is the composition a factor are there any exceptions that's a great question because you might ask if i have a lot of space between me my nearing neighboring planets did i eat everything right all right and would i then be the biggest planet right okay you could think about it that way um there's some truth to that perhaps um jupiter's big it's the biggest planet of them all right but saturn has more room between it and jupiter and it and uranus than jupiter has between it and mars and it and saturn so it's not a direct one-to-one relationship right so because in fact saturn is twice as far away from the sun as jupiter is and then uranus is twice again as far away right so it's so there's way more space out there but it doesn't always mean this and by the way when you look at early modelings of the formations of solar systems stuff it's it's it's a shooting gallery it's it's it's mean back then stuff is slamming in it's a pinball machine it's a pinball machine yeah where the where the ball stick together whether to stick together or blow each other apart right one or the other worst pinball game ever so so when we do this it's a um when you run those simulations you find many objects that might have hung around and collected more material competing with the material you want to collect it gets ejected from the solar system entirely or sent down to to plunge into the sun and vaporize so it doesn't precisely work that way but i say by and large if you have a bigger sort of gravitational zone we would expect you to be bigger but it's not a perfect it's not a perfect relationship all right cool nice question yeah by the way yeah he ended by saying tyson nye 2020. okay might be a little late for you to get on the ballot but still there's the sentiment okay all right there you go all right let's go to michael g thompson from facebook and michael says if i was on an alien planet many light years away but i had a telescope a powerful telescope powerful enough to see people on distant planets what would it be what would be possible based on how far away my alien planet is would it be possible for me to see actual roman battles taking place if i were looking here at earth yes if you are at the distance in light years from earth that corresponded to the time in the past that those roman battles took place so when when did you have the coliseum that's to say 2000 years ago the time of jesus right because that's the whole storyline there right um and so find a star 2000 light years away get park yourself on a planet there you have to do that now and get a nice big telescope aim it towards earth and you will see the roman coliseum in real time wow well delay time right exactly in your real time correct and they're gone time there's a galaxy is it m101 or m100 there's a beautiful spiral galaxy that's 65 million light years away from the milky way so you know i want to go there and look back right what do i get to see the beginning of everything here 65 million years ago well not the beginning of everything but the beginning of what we you know this this 65 chuck 65 million years ago was wasn't that the dinosaurs yes thank you that's what i said the beginning of everything now the beginning of this crap i call that i forget that's what you that's what that's what you'd write on an exam trying to get partial credit because you didn't remember it was dinosaurs i said i said dinosaurs but anyway i was trying to think i wrenched it out of you no i was trying to think which which scene it was like you know is it the plisty scene oh yeah yeah that's what i was trying to think of but and they got a little bit of a renaming so it's no longer the kt boundary okay um and but uh there's a more accurate less memorable name that it's been given okay but the point is that boundary the 65 million year ago boundary uh an asteroid struck earth took out the dinosaurs that's it wreaked havoc uh you bear witness to that right from this galaxy 65 million years ago that's so cool and you couldn't even say look out you couldn't even well you can't warn anybody yeah warn anybody already happened you got to sit there and watch it because you're watching or you're watching a re-run damn it's already happened so so the point is you can't go there from here to see your past right who knows you could if you could beat the light beam right so see that's so let me ask you this what you just said now that sparks in me this okay you can't get there but if you were already there you could see the pass so now that says all right why is it then that we can move up and down back and forward left and right on this axis right but we can't move back in time if theoretically like we can't not even theoretically we can't do it you gotta let me you gotta beat the light in order to do it let me let me reask your question you're saying if time is a coordinate like all the other coordinates right and we can move back and forth in x y and z why can't we move back and forth in time right that's the question yes yes okay so it isn't it is indeed true we are prisoners of the present forever transitioning from our inaccessible past to our unknowable future now see i asked you a question and you didn't turn it into a dog going poetry slam i mean that is beautiful what you just said it's gorgeous but yeah so um it would be very interesting if you could step out of your timeline and then rejoin yourself um yeah either in your future or in your past and but that kind of would imply that your timeline is predetermined in the same way the coordinate the coordinate is right because that coordinates are definitely predetermined if i step over there right um that's been there's waiting for me to step there interesting it doesn't invent itself as i arrive and it's there okay so oh so now wait hang on we got to take a break oh crap man because i gotta notice because you bring up pre-determination and then you say we gotta take a break time for a break you're worse than my therapist just what i'm about to have a breakthrough he's like and that's all we have time for today when we come back more cosmic aquarius galactic gumbo edition we're talking about uh i guess in this moment time travel remember your turn shark have you calmed down your therapist on speed dial exactly so you asked a very important question why can't we move on our time coordinate right if it is what everyone what the physicists say it is it's just another it's just another coordinator exactly three right no it is a little different because it we are prisoners of its present right that's why it's a little different but if you could step out of that coordinate yeah you could go backwards you could go back and forth so so so now that so then you bring up this is more philosophical than it is you know physics but you know i'm going to ask um speaking of stepping out so that you know connotes uh infers uh if your mama over here we infer it implies it implies correct okay right i was about to say i'm a mother an english teacher yes she was i was what i should have said was i'm inferring that's what i should have said but uh because i'm not sure if it implies but i'm inferring that that would um that would connote the unfolding of time as opposed to the pre-determination of time if what if we're if we lack the ability to step out of these coordinates and look at our timeline thereby being able to identify a point in the past and go back does that mean that being a prisoner of the present means that the present is not determined because there are some people who believe in predetermination yeah i mean it i mean maybe pre-i mean yeah i i don't know okay because that's a rough that's a crazy thing that you just would are you suggesting that if you could step out right it would require that it's predetermined yes so the fact that we can't step out is the evidence that maybe we have free will and you know that's it's funny because when you see when you say it that way free will be i think brings in a completely different philosophical discipline but i but but i i look at it more as a and it as a present unfolding more so than i look at free will which which means that we have some influence okay maybe not free will because that's so philosophical but we have some influence like yeah the problem is if you rejoined yourself in the past and you changed something that prevented you from stepping out of your future then you could not have rejoined you yourself in the past damn so there's a it's it's a ti it's a it's a causality conjecture violation right um which stephen hawking had proposed that he suggested there will never be backwards time travel and one day we will discover why um and it's called it's a time it's a time protection cringe conjecture wow where yeah because you you can't go back in time and prevent your parents from meeting then you would have never been born to have gone back in time to prevent your parents from meeting wow so you've got to avoid those kinds of paradoxes that's it and it may be that there's a law of physics that prevents it we don't know by the way this brings me to superman if i may uh oh i always love when we talk superman so go ahead okay uh this i've said this in some other videos but here and now it's relevant okay i got a call from dc comics some years ago okay and they wanted to have superman visit the hayden planetarium all right okay by the way that's i mean you know just another afternoon and the life of neil degrasse tyson you know hi neil well hello uh this is dc comics just want to know if superman i could drop by okay all right oh that's great you could have visited two i didn't know that oh that is so good that is so good but go ahead so they wanted to know superman could visit the hayden plants and i said they wanted my permission i said sure and then they said well do you mind if he meets you in this and i said sure okay okay of course we can meet and then i asked what the story line was the story line was um he wants to use the observing capabilities of the planetarium to look back at krypton to see it get destroyed gotcha okay because he did a calculation to realize that the light from that episode which is when he was born was finally reaching earth right and so he wanted to witness this so i said all right wait all right i said wait uh you can't just do that unless one of two things happens either he traveled here in a wormhole okay beating the beam of light right okay because you can't go faster than the speed of light but you might be able to get places faster than the speed of light well what so he has to say right he has to tunnel through space in some kind of way right and and we do know that he arrived in you know moses style in a basket right not much older than when he was launched he shall deliver my people okay so so go ahead and infants you you can tell when they've aged weeks and even months right so here's an infant it's really no older when it arrived than when it was launched so it got here basically instant or excuse me or it traveled at the speed of light and didn't age right traveled at the speed of light then the speed of light of the dying civilization would have arrived at the same time he did right so thereby rendering it impossible for him to forgive back at his past so i told him it's got to be a wormhole gotcha and this oh great when they're taking notes and they're writing it down fine so so we do this and then i said well how old is superman because this will depend on how you know how far away the star is from earth okay because if if he was launched when he was born at whatever age he is now that's how many light years away the thing is right okay that's how that works right so they said he's eternally in his late 20s so i said okay by the way neil so am i [Laughter] so i asked him i said do you have um do you want me to find you a star a red star like krypton do you want me to find you a red star at about that distance and we could just declare that to be superman's home home planet and so you could do that i said yeah there's a bajillion stars out there went to the catalog found a star found a red star found a red star 27 light years away boom there it is so now in superman canon there is this star an actual star in the night sky which is where he came from and so and he comes and then he observes it and he's very sad because he knew it happened intellectually but then he sees it as we recreate the image at the hayden planetarium so that's actually done in action comics 14. all right that that's a really cool story okay comics 14. that's in the comments 14. i got to give it to you man that is a really and by the way i was a little a little chubby then i'm a little chubby now but i so i said to the illustrator i said if it makes no difference to you could you take off a few pounds i just asked and they said dr tyson this is the world of the comics everyone looks good yeah we're going to give you a six-pack kid yeah so i'm there standing poison as i did in my youth right um and so yeah it's a fun act if you want to find action comics 14. all right that's super cool man all right it's in there i guess we should move on even though i guess so all right next question that's precisely related to that question yeah i love it all right uh portuguese for americans says this for americans he says he says what would happen if something made earth rotate in the opposite direction speaking of superman by the way i did not plan this i swear to god i did not plan this i just happened to look down and this was the next question that jumped out i didn't even know it was coming up and he says as christopher reeves did in the superman movie i can't believe that just happened but that this is this is kismet it must be meant to be uh so go ahead wait what's the question oh yeah what would happen if you actually did rotate the earth backwards what would happen okay so you stop us first of all you stop us and then you start us in the other way what happens okay so um you don't want this to happen we all die that's the answer next question i was joking i really don't know what happens uh what happens it reminds me i recently tweeted about i do tweet this every five years or so um you know if you took all the veins arteries and capillaries out of your body and tied them end to end okay you would die okay that's funny all right that's a funny joke by the way man that's so i put that out there i like that and then people get all serious with it you realize you would die before you had the chance to tie them into anger people tried to analyze it now welcome to my world your premise is untenable sir okay so anyway let's just say you you slow us down to a stop because it's worse than that okay it's worse than you've ever been going fast in your car yeah and and someone puts on the brakes in a steady slow down but it's it's you put on very steady in a steady slowdown you feel yourself leaning forward the entire time the brakes are applied thank god i have the active restraint seat belt which actually grabs me and pulls me back because you're still going for you're you're still feeling still feeling that forward motion okay while the earth is slowing down everyone will lean east what okay all right this is cool all right everybody will be leaning at exactly the same at least depending on how quickly we slow ourselves down right okay so so what what you'll think of as vertical will be a lean at that point okay and you'll stay there until we stop and as we come to a stop then you'll stand erect again okay but then we're not rotating so one side of the earth will always face the sun well this didn't last that long right because he's sped right here he's speaking it's right there okay so that's fine because otherwise you get a very unequal heating of the earth and that could wreak havoc climactically but then he quickly sped us up and had us go the other way so then you lean because now you were decelerating now you're accelerating at any time there's an acceleration you're going to feel that as a sort of a constant right sort of lean okay and so let me get it straight so if we you'll you'll actually continue to lean east is that right was accelerating this way yeah so you'll continue to lean east because the same force that slows you down and speeds you up in the other direction is the same force operating the whole time wow okay okay so in other words he's pushing against the rotation of the earth right and you lean against that but he just keeps going through zero and and rotates us back the other way so that same force does that you'll feel that lean and but he has to stop that and then send it back the other way so then you'll all be leaning the other direction until we're back to our normal speed but nothing would have happened to the timeline there is no backwards time that is nothing now what about the things that are not the the physical characteristics of the earth that are not nailed down like well since like that oh so sorry so all the oceans would slosh up yeah so the atlantic ocean would begin to slosh up onto europe and uh in africa and the pacific would slosh up onto thank you i forgot all about that because the ocean is not is not um stepping on the with friction to the earth it has a slosh with it yeah so you'll basically flood all the continents so okay so all right so there you go all right well it depends on how important basically superman killed everybody killed everybody when he did what just to save lois lane by the way by the way in the words of donald trump not that hot [Laughter] well i'm told by people in the know that there's a reason for that okay what is it because they if if loris lane were a beauty queen right then you as an average person would not have access to superman because if you're you know you're not as beautiful as the singular beauty queen right so they drop her down a few notches closer to sort of your average person and then if you're an average person then you can say oh i could i can bag superman i'm hot enough for superman i'm hot enough you know you say what floss lane can do really i can do this no i can get them that would be totally the the mindset right exactly oh that's too funny uh so now the problem is if he had stopped it abruptly then we'd all fall over and roll do east 800 miles an hour and then that'd be the end of anything that's not attached to the earth yeah so but the fact that he did it slowly means there's a chance you could survive right if you have a boat yeah if you have a boat chuck we got to end it there oh crap no no i'm sorry they're a little fun these are so much gumbo and since they don't fit a category they're their own that's why they have their own flavor i think that's why they're so much fun because it's just you just never know who's going to ask what we got to do more all right chuck always good to have you always a pleasure tweeting at chuck nice comment thank you sir i don't follow many people i follow you well thank you i follow you too to the end to the ends of the earth to the end even when superman is slashing it full of water you got it uh star talk cosmo aquarius neil degrasse tyson as always keep looking up [Music] you

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 297,728

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, cosmic grab bag, dark gravity, dark energy, black hole, five ages of the universe, superman explained, superman

Id: Ew3wBGaQH7A

Length: 45min 8sec (2708 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020