New Mysteries of the Universe | StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson

this is Startalk this is Startalk and I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson I'm an astrophysicist your personal astrophysicist and I my day job is as the director of the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History right here in New York City and as always for Startalk my co-host is a professional comedian today we have with us Eugene Mirman Eugene thanks for being back very glad to be yeah yeah but what you've been doing lately you um I've been touring I have an album that came in tour an album in yeah okay cool that's largely what I've been doing that's what stand-up comedians do yeah they release an album and they tour well everybody doesn't yet or they're like tell people about their album sometimes I can do it on the radio except I read this is not an album this is like nine yet this is nine volumes it took a few years to make it's full of a lot of ridiculous things and meditations sound effects 45 minutes of crying that's one of the volumes and so people lined up to buy this well you don't have to line up anymore you can use the image Oh Oh gone is that a whole spread Ian yeah exactly hopefully two people stood in line I mean there's also stand-up it's a normal album and it's not like anyway so this edition of Startalk cosmic queries you we've solicited questions from our fan base and all the different social media platforms and you're gonna read them to me I've not seen them before and the this what is the theme today the theme is new discoveries and new mysteries of the universe okay so I hope you're up on your new mysteries I don't know if I'm up on this we'll find out we'll find out because I'm classically trained and so I know yeah so I know stuff yeah but if I'm like turning the page of the very latest discoveries or maybe not so ya know if that's the case okay bring it on Nicole Brooks from patreon asks based on the expanding knowledge of wormholes and Tipler cylinders do you think it is theoretically possible to travel through the past or the future using one of the following devices only wormholes only Tipler cylinders or wormholes for present / future travel and Tipler cylinders for the past the answer is yes it's theoretically possible because you can show how moving through a wormhole can put you back in the time frame from which you left mm-hmm you can show that but we don't know how to make a wormhole it's not a realistic thing yet that we it was but theoretically once we figure out how to make Cajuns tell us we can do it unless having made the wormhole we then make discoveries that tell us that we can't right and it's been hypothesized by Hawking among others mm-hmm that there might be a universal law of physics that prevents you from traveling backwards in time because suppose you did this and you prevented your parents from meeting one another then they you would have never been conceived enough to go back in time to prevent them from meeting one another right so this would be it's apparent a temporal paradox yeah and maybe the laws of physics when we get there will tell us about this paradox and therefore prevent it right or create another you couldn't get another universe yes yeah it's like at any point where we're a a past event has changed then a new universe spawns off that was just a way to not have to really answer the question right oh if that is okay yeah it was given serious theoretical and physical thought right behind the New Worlds interpretation there was invoked for quantum physics yeah back in the 1920s the weird things were happening and maybe all things were happening and we were just choosing which path through reality accounted for what we saw so you're not convinced the Back to the Future trilogy as possible certainly not the Cubs winning the World Series apparently as they should have done this October 250 2015 all right well all right good okay so from Facebook a duyst in here asks what if there is an alien mega-structure what would that mean for humanity so probably this questioner is referring to one of the the suspected exoplanets that Kepler the telescope discovered yeah and normally what Kepler is looking for is a slight dip in the light of the host star as the planet eclipses in front of it mm-hmm so the planet will will drop it by maybe 1% and we can measure intensity of light accurately enough to and with enough precision to say how big the planet is what its orbital period is and all the like but it has found something that is some structure that has no resemblance to Planet 2 it the signature of a planet and it's been suggested maybe they were building a one of these Dyson spheres where if you want to way to think about it is if you what are we doing to get energy we're like fighting wars right digging stuff and Grendel's out of the ground all right that's pretty primitive our plants eat our sunlight did they do they that's how they describe it but I'm not wrong so their levels of civilization that you can reference depending on how sophisticated they are in obtaining energy so one of them would be you can tap energy from Earth so volcanoes earthquakes tornadoes cyclones we should talk charging our phones with tornadoes exactly if you can do that then earth is supplying all the energy you need or it's a source of energy unlike anything you might have had before well can you go more than that yes you could tap all the energy that your host star can give you well how would you do that well you can put up solar panels whether you can only put that on the surface of the earth but it's sending energy out in every direction in space mm-hmm so why not put up solar panels all around the star so all the energy that leaves the star hits the solar panels and you take every ounce of energy that star has to give you that's another level of so and then how do you get that to your planet well you wire it up or whatever I mean you'd have a very long cable yes if you can do that you might have a sub salute exactly exactly you figure that out and the next level of civilization is you command all the energy of all the stars in your galaxy and the highest level would be commanding all the energy of all the galaxies in the universe so we would have to be a higher level civilization to be able to maneuver and manipulate wormholes and so we're not there yet we are so far from it yeah so so there you have it okay yeah yeah what's next next is James from Facebook he asks what is New Horizons mission now or is it just drifting towards the kookier Belt yeah so the New Horizons mission that's the mission that went to find Pluto and did a flyby got awesome data from Pluto closeup high-resolution images that are still coming in the spacecraft was pared down and wait so that it could get to its destination as fast as possible because the number one rule in science is what go very quickly you want to finish your experiment before you die right so going quickly would matter yeah so you have the lucky not totally wrong you're not totally wrong so you want the lightest spacecraft and the most powerful boosters mm-hmm to get you there and that's a potent combination for getting there quickly so we got to Pluto in in 10 years yeah and and we passed the moon's orbit in 9 hours we I mean the spacecraft yeah and 900 it took the it took the astronauts three days to cover that distance so this thing's booking out of the solar system so it past Pluto in a flyby and now it is not adrift in the Kuiper belt they're selecting targets for it it still has fuel so it can maneuver in in certain by certain angle and that angle is enough to have it come close to other frozen bodies in the outer solar system whose properties resemble that of the moon and it's sending that info back to us as well it will one way it gets there that's correct yeah okay great all right Jared on Facebook asses to build megastructures in space when you need something say the size of a mineral-rich asteroid belt or a moon mind for the same so what they're saying is if you're gonna build a huge structure in space that uses more mineral resources than your planet can't supply yeah you'd have to get this stuff in from space yeah but that's not a problem because we know the asteroids are an unlimited Sencha ly limitless supply yeah of all the ingredients that would otherwise be rare on earth so the rare earth elements there's only rare on earth right they're not rare an asteroid in particular handpicked asteroids so yeah you would need resources from beyond your home planet but with people are well aware of that yeah and I think if you're building this mega structure you'd that's what you direct that's how I would do it yeah Dave Maass Facebook asks what needs to be improved in carbon nanotube technology to build large space structures but so I so first of all the some years ago I forgot what year it was was it 1989 or 90 when they discovered a new molecule carbon 60 mm-hmm this is 60 carbon atoms that the way to make 60 carbon atoms into one molecule is you can connect them in a particular way where they end up making a sphere and that sphere was the the vertices of the geodesic dome mm-hmm that was advanced by Buckminster Fuller and so these these spheres came to be known as bucky balls and i think they are the same seams and nodes that you find on a stiched soccer ball the older soccer ball that has X a Gon's and and Pentagon's so so there it is now if you cut it in the middle and spread it and then put carbon fibers connecting one side to another you go from a carbon Bucky ball to a carbon nanotube so it's the same scale of chemistry and so this would be way stronger than steel way lighter than steel it would completely transform construct the construction industry because you want things that are strong but light yes it's kind of how that works sounds like transparent aluminum from Star Trek that's the save the whales yeah exactly so question now is if you can build long tubes these would replace steel cables for all of your needs and make things lighter cheaper faster better the problem is last I checked the longest nano tube that they've been able to make has been maybe a centimeter down and because we don't have tools to plant to position molecules we have to coax them into these configurations based on the apparatus and the temperature and the pressure and and the mixture of other chemical once they're made they can they live out in the world yeah I don't see why not given our strengths and so so once now the the space elevator will you take an elevator to orbit is something that would basically require carbon nanotubes but we have go from a centimeter length to 23,000 miles of length right this is we're not there yet yeah that sounds yeah it sounds like it's gonna take time right okay Martin Holden asks on Facebook what are the books that a budding cosmologists should have in their library it depends on what level but I would say a fun book just cuz it's big an audacious big hairy and audacious is a book called gravitation mm-hmm and it's written by three authors Misner thorne and wheeler wheeler was the guy who first coined the term black hole Thorne was the guy who was the science advisor to the movie interstellar mm-hm and his first name is Kip and one of the robots in interstellar was called Kip by the way in case you're no longer with us yes as Bill Nye is fond of saying and also he wrote a companion book to the movie interstellar called the science of interstellar so he's one of the authors and the third is it as a professor from the University of Maryland and Charles Misner and that it's a huge book is called just called gravitation and they're two tracks the WIMP track and the advanced track in the book in the book or layman the other color-coded and so if you want the easier track you read the pages with the black corners and you want the harder when you read the ones with the white corners oh yeah maybe I'll try it so that one if you're if you're kind of advanced yeah the one I read you either one but if not then there's so many excellent popular level books Brian Greene's the fabric of the cosmos and and Lisa Randall has three books all about cosmology and our understanding of our place in the universe so you can start with those popular level accounts and then ascend from there okay yeah um Amy danger on face book a straight name I know a very good name my nine-year-old daughter wants to know why our moon doesn't have a name I'm with her why doesn't remove it does have a name what it Jeff Freddie yeah so I stir me so all the planets are named for Latin gods so you would expect any name for Earth or the moon to be Latin and so you you would expect it would expect so the Earth Moon and Sun have Latin corresponding names and we can use the use them in my field everyone know what your what's the name of the name of Earth is Terra Terra the name of the moon is Luna Luna oh yeah yeah and the name of the Sun is Sol oh not like it's so you L yeah it really cool but Sol and so those Latin words have all been lifted to become the roots of other words Sol Sol is the the root of solar system right and Luna like lunatic and lunar month and yeah this sort of thing so was a lunatic is someone who acts crazy after they see the full moon but they don't tend to act crazy when it's cloudy out right they don't even know that it's full I didn't know that lunatics specifically with someone who was crazy for moonlight Oh your moonlight we call it well no one uses it that way no that's not that is okay yeah wow that's great to know so Amy the moon does have a name is Luna yes Sol Sol Terra and Luna nice Martin Holden asks on Facebook is space continuous or granular all evidence points to that it's granular in a quantum physics which has been trumping every other field that it has touched mm-hmm it's the most accurate theory of the universe we have ever put forth tells us that space is granular that there's a so what does it mean for it to because you smallest possible lengths that you can measure in space there's a smallest possible unit of time that can exist in space and this granulation of space and time would tell us that in fact space is not continuous by the way general relativity Einstein's theory of gravity requires that space be smoothly continuous so there's a there's a shotgun war going on there about who's gonna be right in the end and if you're a betting person you put your money on quantum physics really wait so that means that if you were to get to the edge of the universe then what would be nothing about the edge of how small you can divide the fabric of space and time oh by the way this is not a weird concept right if you take a sheet and you say okay give me a section of the she'd and you cut it section are fine and I give you a 1 foot square let's say and now you send on a smaller section I give you 1 inch square I want an even smaller section 1 millimeter squared now suppose you're asking me for a section of the squeak the sheet that is smaller then the fibers are tracking within the sheet mm-hmm is that still sheet ooh yeah your fibers are there now you're in a zone within the stitches of the fiber where there's no sheet at all so pieces of the sheet are no longer heterogeneous ly represented right because your sizing is smaller than the stuff dropping it in the first place so now you're going to that's building blocks this way exactly so so right now everything looks continuous because we're not we're not dealing with these very small sizes right but when you do get there and you try to measure time you'll find that you won't be able to and its granular yes all right now I understand I just learned recently there's a freak me out and I have to like read up on it cuz it's not where so I learned that some ideas of the expanding universe will have the universe in some places where the space-time fabric itself melts what does that mean I don't know what it means I tried to I'll come back to you on this okay because I'm very curious like that's what it means for space-time to melt right that the space-time might have corresponding states of matter going on within them and and you might be able to melt space and I just and then you could you could drink it I can't wait to tell people I've drunk one liter of molten space I don't know I hope we all find out in 2038 we'll come back to cosmic queries wondering what are the new discoveries in the universe stay with us back on Startalk I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson Eugene Mirman right here Eugene what do you what do you tweet it at Eugene Mirman knew that yeah I know I just wanna get you to say that yeah no you you tricked me now it's like Mick selects I you've said said my name forwards and I'm still here so it's great fall I do follow you and it's great just hearing your your reflection sometimes is he serious or is he something wonder you know what maybe I mean both maybe comedians need more emoticons to sound they're just so we know we're on our journey and there's another one who died see joke about this they say back in my day we had to use our face to make emoticons so so you've got questions from our fan base yeah and it's just about new discoveries in the universe and if I don't know it I just I don't know Oh answer it anyway some misleading okay here we go William on Twitter asks what are your thoughts on the mysterious structure orbiting a star 1500 light-years away yes so that's related to the earlier question about alien megastructures yeah so I I don't know what that structure is by the way I didn't I don't think I detailed earlier these structures that pass between the telescope and the host star it's we know it's not a planet so so so what what are some of the options and what it's giving the light in odd significant and unusual ways right of the host that we've never seen before never seen I've never seen and that's why people think of they're building structures to grab the sunlight the star light and beam it back to the home planet so so I tend to be very conservative in my yeah in my scientists alien civilization the subject of advanced alien civilization and I would say just because we do not know what it is it does not then mean it's alien mega-structure right something we don't know it's so and I said it's probably something more mundane accounting for it like a super thick cloud of space debris odd I don't know what is the water what kinds of so alien mega-structure is one theory and after that one hypothesis sorry right yeah yeah so what are some other hypotheses because there's the theory of evolution in Syria gravity right and and the hypothesis yeah yeah it's not you G's theory is once it's been agreed on it yeah yeah it's very powerful and okay i bothers is is like this is a very good guess and you just came up with it on the spot yeah so what are some other hypotheses so alien Megan maybe a cloud of comets that had broken apart but we're still traveling together as a game really good get some mind yeah a huge comment and you break it apart into multiple pieces all the pieces still travel together Oh in orbit around the Sun kind of like Anna o in a pack of cards like an a bunch of yeah yeah burn they'll slowly separate flocking yeah they'll slowly separate but not until you get some good right movements there so if you have to start with a huge comet and it breaks apart into a hundred pieces now you have more blockage of your hosts are but it still was not repeating periodically which any orbiting object would do so it's a it's a tremendously fascinating mystery and I'm content in knowing it's a mystery not all the choir of the mystery that it yields a solution on the spot John on Twitter asks as the universe expands well the Higgs field expand and thus weakened to the point of matter degeneration same with EMF yeah so I don't know if what effect the expansion of the universe has on the Higgs field mm-hmm I'm guessing it might dilute it in some way and the question is how does that then affect the mass that it grants to particles within that field so I I do not know the answer to that okay Joey make up an answer no I appreciate your honesty more okay sorry wrong answer on my part if make up an answer if it did weaken and that somehow interfered with the ability of the Higgs field to grant master particles mm-hmm that would be completely destabilizing on the universe mm-hmm that'd be awesome and what would happen then well I don't know if particles have less mass than we thought they did or they can I fly could I be able to fly and just because you'd have less mass doesn't mean you can fly know how so it but what it would there be a point at which though that would be the case you need strength in another thing okay or because Roper Mac body weight what if I could control magnets well then you're not like like Megan oh yeah but then you're not really no I say I mean yeah you you're you need maggots magnets wherever you need to do your you're trying yeah right right okay fair enough I just trying to figure out how I could fly but I don't think that's what he was trying to do okay David asks on Twitter will the presence of water on Mars affect how we manufacture fuel for the return trip not for the well in the future possible certainly yeah yeah because fuel the what is water made of the chemically h2o thing very nice very nice and h2o it turns out is rocket fuel not in the form of order but if you separate the hydrogen and the oxygen and you bring them together to make a molecule the water molecule then they it is hugely exothermic mm-hmm a lot of energy gets released and it makes an ideal rocket fuel so if you go to Mars and you want to use resources in situ mmm-hmm then converting the water under the soils into rocket fuel is an ideal usage usage case so the future of that expedition okay so yeah James asked what question would you like to have answered before you die regardless of if you think it will or even can be and why yeah so I've got a cop-out answer to that uh-huh I like the questions that no one have thought up yet have thought of yet because they only emerge from having made a discovery that you're after in that moment right those are the questions I so so I would not have even known to ask 100 years ago how many asteroids could render humans on earth extinct because the asteroids were not thought not known to cross the orbit of the earth so so now I'm asking a question that was unforeseen Bo right in a day so this would be something like how do we control wormholes to go back in time to kill all our grandparents but we can't conceive of that quite yet yeah so so so this is the this is the challenge I would say mm-hmm the challenge is that coming up with is new discoveries that will lead to new questions yeah so yeah sorry so so so I think this is my challenge in coming up with the question because I love the questions that have not even been thought up yet so therefore I can't even share them with you right but when they do arise it's like wow that was good that was a good one right yeah all right Louis asks theoretically if a man is sent to Mars for a year would he be awake and asleep for the same amount of time as a earthling yeah I mean you can set a schedule that's slightly different from Earth maybe a 20 maybe a 25 hour day or a 23 hour day and people that tend to stay up later in the morning people and their nighttime people yeah you could probably take a boatload of nighttime people put them on a ship and have them go to Mars and have them live in a 26 or 27 maybe even a twenty eight hour day because they're always staying up late pushing how what's the day of Mars how long is it that's about 24 hours okay oh that's very cool you wouldn't even need to know yeah it may be different by 20 minutes or something okay but by the way people who work on Mars or rather scientists colleagues of mine who study Rovers that were at work on Mars they have a watch that's made so that the 24 hours on that watch matches the exact rotation rate of Mars so that they can live on a Mars time as well as human time right and I wonder if they go like okay well see you at dinner at 7 Mars time and the reason where they have to do that is they need to know when Moke many of the Rovers have solar panels in things and all of them have solar panels and so you need to know when is it exposed to the Sun recharging its batteries when is it not right good answer mm-hmm all right jared has a question and his question is would it be plausible to find gravity waves by observing the resonant frequency of say a mile-long piano string ooh hmm what do you think yeah so the mass and energy in a piano string is insufficient to generate a detectable gravity wave so you need you need a major gravitational disturbance in the fabric of space and time what would that into a collision of two black holes Oh collision of two piano strings not measuring up to the - yeah sorry about that but but he's thinking that that this vibration would somehow vibrate the fabric of the universe and know it would vibrate any kind of air molecules right that it touched on doing so and in space there's no air module so it'll just swing back and forth but it won't generate sound right because the vibration of the air molecules is what we sense a sound the saddest thing is a piano in space all right any musical instrument in space no just pianos the trumpet well yeah just feels like well because of the cost to put a piano there Dennard on Google+ asks with slowing investments in space-based science across the board in multiple countries what effect does this have on limiting human discoveries of our place in the universe yeah that's that's a great question and if you're gonna cut back on science which is the current which would constitute the current roads of discovery then just move back into the cave yeah what are you doing now you can vote for that kind of country but that's not the kind of country I grew up in right we had investments in science and technology you did not need special programs to convince kids that they should be interested in science doesn't built into the fabric of the media cycles well NASA for every dollar put into NASA returns something like seven or eight dollars yeah I hardly ever cite that calculation because there's a lot of or is it somewhat accurate but it's a matter of what you value that goes into the equation that gets that number so that that's the kind of same calculation you do when you say well let's put an opera in town yeah well how are we going to support the Opera well we don't know but if you an opera there then these stores will open up around the entrance to that operate and so it's a seating effect right right many people talk about but but it's it's hard to actually say it's hard to anchor that in a way that if five different people did the same analysis would they get the same answer and the answer is no and that also isn't necessarily the scientific discovery is partially its own end not the fact that correct yeah correct even though some people want you to do it for some purpose it's really for its own in and later on you find out how it really applies yeah all right George organ Jurgen Nyberg asks he was writing from the west coast of Sweden on organ yeah your organ your iceberg mhm any news Rek I see eight four six two eight five two if not do you know what the period dasa T of the dimming has been yes so this is again that this is more alien when he's like wait as you read that you sound like a second grader reading yeah I mean well this I also you know without knowing the the actual number of the planet or whatever it sounds like maybe it's also a failed death threat like any news rate like is like oh don't get cold yes exactly what do you know about yeah yeah so no any word I'm asking on the radio no there's no no updates and it's it's got people it's got people thinking long and hard and deep about what it could be but for me like I said I don't know what it is and I reserve comment okay yeah we have one last question okay mark millar patreon he asks so patreon is that's our funding it's a it's a it's you can be a funding friend yeah of Startalk yeah where and you get certain perks yeah like we'll bring your question to the top of the list I had asked one patreon question and we have one more one more yeah you'll just get to the list well mark already got to ask one in another episode so marks getting a real ton of question in there yeah but they're depending on your participation level yeah promote the the innovations that we're trying to bring - yeah for $1,000,000 I'll carry you nine feet okay that's just one thing I love I think we can do better than that Eugene well if you really love Startalk so don't we had to do better than that very happy our patreon supporters so thanks for being out there yes folks so go ahead go ahead let me ask marks question with the discovery of a black hole expelling some of the matter it had consumed what forces may be responsible for this unusual behavior oh it's not unusual because it's not coming from within the event horizon once you cross over the event horizon just you know kiss your ass good-bye so what's actually happening is all this matter is spiraling towards the black hole Center and it can't all get there all at once and it forms this disk on which all this material accretes and the disk feeds the black hole on the very inner edge of it but until you until it gets to that point you still have this this this assembly of matter and as it spirals down and gets hotter and hotter and hotter and it begins to radiate the radius so ferociously it punches out above and below the disk itself and then you get these Jets these these these long spewed forth signatures of moving matter and so so yes this happens because all this matters trying to get down into the same place at the same time and it's gonna fail in doing so and once you heat up a gas it's got to radiate somewhere and it'll do it it'll do it yeah oh it will that's the promise I make to you so yeah so most of the exotic galactic center phenomenon we've seen with powerful Jets emanating from above and below our galaxy and very intense in all bands of light radio waves microwaves ultraviolet x-rays so we have we have established over the decades that the thing that's causing all that violence in the galaxies are black holes with matter trying to get in there too fast creating these explosive accretion discs so that's how it comes out of a black hole and we're we say it loosely oh this came out of the black hole no it came out of the vicinity of the black hole not out of the black hole itself but when we come back more cosmic queries on the latest stuff in the universe I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson Eugene Mirman we'll see you in a moment we're back on Startalk cosmic queries edition first two segments we did questions related to news discoveries exactly and now we're going straight to grab bag' alright let's see what it is let's do this Andrew asks is it possible that the long-term collection of matter space mining may cause a change in the way the Earth orbits the Sun or the moon orbits the earth is there a tipping point of the earth collecting changing mass from a large asteroid that can change its gravitational pull on the moon or the sun's pull on the earth yes yeah next question no it's not as bad as you think however because if you take all of the asteroids in the asteroid belt mm-hmm and collected it together back into one solid mass mm-hmm you can ask how much is that Florida okay so it's about 5% of the mass of our Moon mm-hmm so one twentieth of the moon and so we could accumulate all mass of all the asteroids and we would barely notice it in terms of our own weight mm-hmm and the moon's orbit would adjust a little but not by not much right and so it's really not not an issue okay yeah nothing to loosen the belt scared of that and by the way anything large enough that we did bring to earth that would badly disrupt our orbit would be bad enough on earth to render us extinct so it would not be the kind of questioning like Mars if we brought Mars to earth that would be bad very bad yes that's the end of both Mars and Earth what's the most with Mars without it being a problem you can put it wherever you want but and it'll affect our orbit around the Sun but not in any bad way but you want to combine them yeah that's bad super plan super that's bad for both okay right Adrian asks hello dr. Tyson would it be possible within our lifetime to extend people's natural life synthetically through either BIOS cybernetics or bioengineering to such an extent that while they may not live forever they might certainly be around for the next 100 to 200 years or more yeah so I we got people working on this now this is this is not science fiction it's science fact and and it people are thinking oh the engineering of it we hybridize biology with with material science and perhaps and maybe that's not even necessary maybe we just find the gene for aging and snip it cut it alter it what would happen so how would a geing work if theoretically you didn't age the way that things currently age because you'd still get older like you'd still have things you would be older yeah but to get older we make synonymous with becoming more frail or weak right you would be an older entity yes right so there would be a different a new type of frailty would develop we're just from simply being 200 years old you might have a frailty that you didn't have is that what you're saying no I'm saying if you if you live if you live a long time beyond any current actuarial tables it may be that the decline we see in our bodies from age like 50 to 80 maybe that would happen between age a hundred and 100 and between 150 and 200 for example right but you have a more a bigger chunk of your time being alive would you would be physically fit and help right you can play a lot more soccer it has huge consequences because that means the population of the earth could would go up yeah and let the human population unless you made fewer babies because the equilibrium of people and new jobs and all it has built in the fact that people die well what if we just let only rich people live forever would that be something people would like well that's what happened in what's the movie time the time was a come on oh yeah then there's where there's money where like they built the space station no but there's a lot of movies where the rich people get to live for a long time all right well that's good to know that people are working on this terrible thing that will destroy mankind but also be kind of fun I think it to live forever I've spoken on this before I I think that's misguided it's suppose you actually live forever right then what is the value of tomorrow to you well maybe if you just live for 200 years then you still have like a little fear but not as much about it yeah I just wonder I knowing that I'm going to die yeah is a fundamental part of what creates meaning for any moment I'm alive right and if a day goes by where I didn't like discover something or learn something or or play with my kids or going to play date with my wife or or or contribute to this world in some fundamental way I wasted that day and if I live forever I would not have the state of mind that I could waste any time at all right and I don't know what that would mean for people's creativity you could still be blown up in a war if that makes you feel any better you mean did not die naturally right right right yeah so I think it living forever might be overrated yeah the living for 200 years underrated all right Aaron asks how are those fashionable easily worn space suits coming along read the Mars episode of Nova ScienceNOW yeah so I don't have the latest on that but they you know part of the challenge of course is the spacesuit needs to be pressurized because typically you're bounding around in someplace that doesn't have normal atmospheric pressure and it's got to keep you your temperature regulated mm-hmm warm when it's cold out and cool when it's warm out and that can change on a dime yep ending up what side of you is facing the Sun for example and so and you want it to be flexible so you can still bound around a planetary surface and maybe do science experiments or or just do sports right right it's true maybe you want to play space tennis okay or something and when you do that you want to have the mobility that a that a flexible space suit would give you a nice I don't know the latest on that and I should check up on that okay by the way if anyone is gonna spend meaningful time on Mars I'm thinking they're gonna want one of these space suits for sure cuz they're one you're gonna want to do Mars Taichi exactly dude Martin cooking classes yes exactly okay Tyler wants to know would have somewhat self-sustaining moon base drastically improve the likelihood of a manned Mars mission yes however I think so however I don't know what it means to be a self-sustaining moon base because we're you're getting your food well you probably you bring a cow and you'd eat just a little bit of the cow you keep it live like in that horrifying movie the road so yeah you we would give us a lot of training just to moving stuff into another location pitching tent right and but we shouldn't think of that as a stepping stone to Mars is way better just go straight to Mars it right explore space but just I happen to like the moon as a target for this because it's within a media cycle away it's like three days away right right when you launch from Earth so you can check up on the astronauts how are you doing you could build like a sort of French Quarter like in New Orleans but you could put it on the moon and you could have some jazz yeah to make it it'll be a place at outpost yeah human outpost so I think we do be a lot of training for what it is to do that mm-hmm what kind of supply chain of food you would need and other resources and do you send up a doctor who can then you know surgeon you know we get to think about how to make that happen how if you had no training and you went into space how sick like would you die or would you just be very upset but what would be weird is if you have a group of people that go to space and then virus mutates and then it affects just that group of people because you're all breathing the same air right eating the same food and touching each other's bodies and so so then you have some weird virus that you didn't have vaccine against because it just arose in that moment and so that so maybe this is the kind of thing you you need confidence that you have way better control over the spread of viruses under those situations than what anybody is exhibiting today okay yeah yeah okay so here's a question rambling Scott asks oh never mind yes how much can you been what you ask me okay rambling Scott wants to know how much can you bet how much can I bet so he didn't ask me on what planetary surface no but I think it's implied that it's Venus okay so Venus has approximately the same gravity as does Earth and so I'd be benching about the same Mars however if you saw the Martian there's the obligatory image of Matt Damon with his chest sticking out and his six-pack abs he's every movie I think has to have a guy with six-pack ABS yeah so that we can completely delude the entire heterosexual female population into thinking that this is just a common thing on guys right yes people talk a lot about how men are subjected to these terrible standards it's so exhausting for us can't live up to those standards yeah so and where have they heard that before right yeah so so on so he's buff yeah but and there he is you see him lifting these huge canisters up and down the stomach area basin of the rover and you say well he's buff so that's why he's doing it no he was doing it because he's on Mars right and if it weighs 300 pounds on earth it weighs 120 pounds on Mars and I want to get up and put it put it where he wants so they did this in the movie they understood this yeah and so yes it does help to be strong but he doesn't have to be as strong as you thought he was right so and that would be a fun so then boxing would be or like Ultimate Fighting would be much more fun to watch on Mars cuz everybody so powerful but I don't know you're not more powerful you doesn't have any more punch to it you could just lift a bigger thing with RO a bigger person yes you could throw people yeah okay it would be fun to watch a throwing contest judo match exactly yeah you can flip people all over so so I would I would bench on Mars so so what'd you take how much I bench on earth divided by 0.4 mm-hmm and then you get a bigger number when you're done and that's how much more I can bench okay a bench on Mars but you notice I didn't say how much I can actually bench I'm sure on Mars it's between three and seven hundred actually that's a very very good yeah let's go to a lightning round yeah okay okay okay let's do okay Higgs wants to know how fast is the speed of dark if Dark Matter emitted light would it be the same speed everything that is electromagnetic energy goes at exactly the same speed so if your Dark Matter emitted any kind of light which we know it doesn't but if it did and at any kind of species association with light at all even if it's a new band of light because the light we know and love microwaves radio waves gamma rays these all bands of light all travels at speed of light so do gravity waves for example so if it's gonna send out energy through space we're pretty sure it's gonna be moving at the speed of light right okay okay go what and why does it go uh what and why does it glow at the center of galaxies the center of galaxies most any time we've had enough data to look in the center of a galaxy with precision we find a supermassive black hole flying and dining upon stars that come too close and in the act of doing so they become highly radiant just outside of their event horizon okay and so yeah so watch every center of every galaxy including our own okay we're all watching good do have you watch out for it yeah yeah do heavier elements get produced in black holes like a star with nuclear fusion if heavy elements get produced in the centers of black holes I didn't know maybe because matter is so dense and under we know what matter does under very dense situations and what is that in your opinion you can emerge nuclei and make heavier elements this is what goes on in the Centers of stars so I do not know what the matter is doing at the center of the black hole after it has passed through okay III I do not know yeah okay when will New Horizons overtake the two Voyager spacecraft as the farthest man-made object from Earth so it turns out turns out the Voyager and I did I ran the numbers on this Voyager one which is the farthest spacecraft from Earth will actually never be overtaken by by New Horizons the New Horizons mission mission to Pluto because the Voyager missions got gravity boosts upon going out and moving past Saturn mmm at past Jupiter got a huge gravity boost and at that point it had more energy to leave the solar system than the New Horizons mission ever did and so the New Horizons mission we wanted to there to get quickly so we didn't have time to chase planets T to to borrow some of their orbital energy to speed not borrow take their order but energy to speed up they went Spacek Elise trait to Pluto but if you're not going straight you can meander and as you may ender then you can steal orbital energy from planets and go out real fast it'll never overtake it Voyager is the is the crown winner of that contest for now boy we got it we got it we got it wow that was quick it was good oh my god we did the lightning round you've been listening to star talk radio and I've been your host Neil deGrasse Tyson and that's been my co-host Eugene Mirman Eugene thanks as always for doing this thank you very much for having me Neil and as always from his desk I bid you to keep looking up this is Startalk [Music]

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 367,024

Rating: 4.8676524 out of 5

Keywords: accretion disks, alien megastructures, black holes, carbon nanotubes, Charles Liu, Dyson spheres, Einstein, Eugene Mirman, General Theory of Relativity, gravitational waves, Higgs field, LIGO, Neil deGrasse Tyson, New Horizons, quantum physics, space elevators, spacetime, time travel, Voyager, wormholes

Id: ga7jMCzXVhw

Length: 47min 28sec (2848 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2017