TimesTalks: Neil deGrasse Tyson

good evening everyone I'm Michele gray the director of programming for the New York Times live conversation series times talks which pairs New York Times journalists with the brightest and boulders creative minds from the fields of film theater music art music literature and science to find out who's coming next go to times talks calm and subscribe to our newsletter I'm delighted to welcome you to tonight's event live here in New York and live on the New York Times Facebook page and times talks calm we're thrilled to be welcoming Neil deGrasse Tyson an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History director of its world-famous Hayden Planetarium host of the hit TV and radio show star talk and cosmos and an award-winning author Tyson is here to celebrate his new book astrophysics for people in a hurry in a world where so few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos Tyson brings universe down-to-earth succinctly and clearly with sparkling wit in tasty chapters consumable anytime anywhere in your busy day you'll hear much more about tonight's guest from our esteemed moderator Amy Harman the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning national correspondent for the New York Times covering the intersection of science and society please join me in giving a very warm welcome to Amy Harman and Neil deGrasse Tyson [Applause] [Music] that's the nice welcome thank you all for 10 that was for me you know you won two Pulitzer Prizes I should be interviewing you okay so a friend of mine told me when I posted on Facebook that I was gonna be interviewing Neil deGrasse Tyson and a friend of mine told me that her 15 year old son was response was oh my god really a little piece of my heart just exploded so I just good thing or bad thing I don't know I get a good way so you know it's an honor to share the stage with scientists who in addition to doing science regularly explodes the hearts of children and adults thank you in a good way but so um I also crowdsource some questions from children but I want to start with one that was weighing on my mind as I read the book because I was reading it while I was on an assignment for a story that I'm still working on where I was talking to a lot of people who are skeptical of the scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet this planet in the book you so you cover a lot of ground this is I'm going to show you this book you all have I think you all bought a copy of this book but it's like tiny right but he covers like 14 billion years and it's goodness book um but so you tell him billion billion billion billion and it's this fascinating history of how scientists are you know have unraveled and are still unraveling the mystery of the cosmos but you also mention a lot of times that scientists were wrong about what they originally thought was true and the people that are skeptical of the scientific consensus about climate change you they say well you know the reason we're skeptical is because scientists are always wrong why should we believe them this time so now you although or a defender I think of the scientific consensus about climate change so I wanted to try to ask you to square those two things for me I do they have a point I mean we provided but I need a little more volume for this one canikin turn up way up the microphone volume for this please thank you so here we go the people who the New York Times calls climate sceptics are really climate deniers okay and your editorial policy as a newspaper uses the word skeptic sometimes we say deniers we're a little bit schizophrenic on that yes you are I've noticed this so so it was an editorial decision I remember when it happened so the point is if you anyone who comes to this problem asserting well science is once thought the world was flat and now you know actually some people today think the world is flat as you know but if anyone comes to the problem behaving that way it is simply because in their educational tenure all the years they've ever spent in school they were not taught what science is or how and why it works and that is a missing piece of a puzzle of a educational puzzle that people have been trying to reassemble and put back together and figure out what it needs to be or should be I can assert without hesitation that all too often we think of children as at any age as a vessel that you pour information in and then you and then you close the vessel hand them a degree and they push them forward into life and if all you know is how to recite information handed to you and you don't know how to process information how to analyze information how to how to pass judgment on information then you are not equipped later on as an adult especially if you're an adult in charge too to you so my point is if you the age of modern science which is the age where you put up on a hypothesis and you test it and you wait to see if other people verify it or falsify it that began beginning around 1600 with Galileo and Francis Bacon before then people just thought stuff up and thought it might be true and sort of lived with it so the transition from a flat earth to a round earth and earth in the middle of the known universe and the Sun in the middle of the known universe all that happened before this era so you are not in a position to invoke that as evidence for how science has now run so like when you say in the book that scientists thought that the Sun was a lump of burning coal for instance that oh well no that's a different thing that's a different thing so now watch now scientists can think all kinds of stuff most of which will be wrong even in the published journals most of what's in the journals will eventually shown to be shown to be wrong okay that's the frontier of research in the frontier the bleeding bloody edge of the frontier of research that we're duking it out at conferences you say something I say I don't believe you and I got better day they're different data and I got my data from somewhere else and you were delusional this goes on on the frontier but you know what happens I get a result you're my competitor and you try to you try to show that I'm wrong and you get a result that agrees with my result oh and then someone from from another country does and they kind of agree there'll always be outliers but what happens is you get this emergent truth an emergent consensus not of opinion but of observation and experiment and when that emerges you have in your possession a new objective truth that will be true whether or not you believe in it and if you think you can just cherry-pick outliers from the body of evidence that is establishing a truth and you think you've got a case upon which to build legislation you don't you are building a house of cards which after a certain level will just collapse under its own weight and it is the most precarious foundation on which to build an informed democracy good answer um which brings which is a good segue for my next question all right just to be clear if they were pointing to the frontier of research and say you guys don't know what you're talking about we say yeah we don't write we don't know they're on the frontier that's not what they're pointing to they're pointing to an emerging consensus that came from chemists biologists botanists climate scientists empirical measurements of the chemistry the atmosphere this is done we're on to other problems and we look back and say what the hell y'all fight what what what if you're going to debate if you're going to debate something about climate you accept that humans are doing it and then have a political conversation about that there's a car is it carbon credits do you do do you put tariffs on Chinese solar panels do you subsidize an industry until it gets off the ground that that's the political conversation because if you lean left or right you'll have different solutions to that but to argue about whether an objective truth and science is correct all right I'm just gonna I did it but let me push you on this one one so in the book I learned I mean may probably most people already maybe I knew this but but so Einstein you talked about Einstein you talked about Newton not Newton was right buddy but Einstein had to fix his law right like even Einstein so that wasn't accepted it was accepted right that I'm just pushing you a little bit on okay so here's how that goes so that's another aspect of nuance of it that I'm glad you mentioned okay so Isaac Newton my man okay now you're a fan to be clear he's my man cuz he like discovered the laws of optics and the laws of motion and the laws of gravity and like practically on a dare he invents integral and differential calculus then he turned 26 okay so are we done here with that oh we do I have agreement here all right so he comes up with his laws of motion and laws of gravity and they apply to everything he had ever seen or measured although the fastest anyone had ever moved might have been a galloping horse in his day but it explained the moon going around the earth and the earth going around the Sun and it would later explain Jupiter's moons going around Jupiter so it wasn't just a law of things that went around the Sun it appeared to be kind of universal in the literal use of that term as opposed to how that word is used so often in our culture Miss Universe she's Miss Earth please all right okay so so so what we later learn as our methods and tools become more and more precise I have to slip something into I slip something okay so watch what happens so we apply Newton's laws and we apply them to Oh William Herschel discovers planet Uranus by accident okay Uranus is the planet just beyond Saturn so by accident and this is after Newton's laws of gravity are published so now we're tracking the orbit of Uranus you should know this is not following Newton's laws it's got some deviation so maybe we found the limits the distance limit over which Newton's laws would apply that'd be interesting but other people said the Newton was so badass it must work ok even there so instead of suggesting that his law was failing clever people said maybe his law applies but there's yet another planet out there that we have yet to discover whose gravity is tugging on it and we did not include that in our calculations so let's do the math and ask where must there be a planet of what mass to create the deviation that we measure and those calculations were done and they were published and an observatory in germany got hold of those calculations and they looked in the exact spot of the sky sky that the calculation said neptune was waiting to be discovered right there it was a triumph of Newton's laws and so so this gives us confidence we're not to pull in us at what we calculate this and the observations show it so now watch what happens we have better and better measurements we find out Newton's law is failing Mercury's orbit is not following what it should that's the closest planet to the Sun well we've been down that path before just throw in another planet that we can't see and that'll fix it so thus was introduced planet Vulcan this be a planet very close to the Sun so closer to be hard to see you'll be lost in the glare and so there was the hunt for Vulcan no one found it but we knew it had to be there because that's the same problem as the discovery of Neptune Einstein comes along comes up with his theory of motion and his theory of gravity the special in general theory of relativity out of those two theories which are corrections to Newton's laws in these extreme regimes if you're nearer the Sun the Sun is very strong gravity if you're moving around and that's strong force of gravity Newton's laws begin to fail and no one knew this and you look at Einsteins laws and he says Mercury's orbit will not follow Newton's laws that will follow this other path find out and it exactly explained the deviations of mercury and so people say Oh see scientist we thought this was right and now we all huddle around this thing that's right no that is not how it works since 19 since 1600 onward the way it works is if you have an experimentally determined result and it's verified and and double-checked and triple-checked that will not later be shown to be false what you can find is a deeper understanding of the world that encloses that understanding and that's what happened with Einstein Einstein's theories of motion and gravity if you put in low speeds and low gravity in the equations they become Newton's equations so Newton's universe is a subset and accurately described subsets of a larger universe that Einstein has described and even with Einstein his equations can't take us to the center of a black hole the singularity that's there the singularity at the beginning of the universe we know now that his theories fail they blow up on the page so we have a whole frontier of science the string theorists you've heard of them the string theorists there we got top people working on this to try to extend Einsteins laws into an even bigger regime that can then explain everything that's in our universe not most things so what you're saying is that human activity is causing the planet oh yes what I'm saying is emergent scientific truths assert this and if you want to deny that in a free country go right ahead but you should not be put in control of anything that involves the earth Neil you have said that in terms of becoming an astrophysicist the universe called you you knew from a young age that this is what you wanted to do you you do jump through all these academic hoops to do it you became an astrophysicist you wrote papers on dwarf galaxies and observing techniques and carbon stars and but what I really want to know is what called you what meat what makes you so good at explaining science and I'm asking you because I feel like I I get asked this by like a lot of scientists wish they were good at explaining science and especially right now we're in this time where scientists I think are coming to like this dot you know should have dawned on them a little earlier perhaps but that you know they need to be talking to the public and explaining science better and they want to know how and they don't know how so do you have any tips for your colleagues so just a couple of insights I just want to know there's a girl over there how old are you you're 9 that's how old I was when I first visited the Hayden Planetarium and the lights dim I grew up in the Bronx and I'd seen the night sky from the Bronx as a dozen stars in it plus or minus and then I go to the Hayden Planetarium and they dim the lights and the stars come out and I thought it was a hoax had to be there aren't that many stars in the night sky I've seen them from the Bronx but in that moment realizing that the universe was far more vast than anything I had dreamt of left me starstruck and I committed my life since then to just learning about the universe in age eleven and twelve I learned the word astrophysics and then I had the answer to that annoying question grown-ups always ask kids what do you want what do you want to be when you grow up I would just say astrophysicist you know kind of that took care of that right there so the the my influences at the time were the educational staff and the scientific staff of the Hayden Planetarium and I remember thinking wow these educators have such a facility with words and ideas and they will speak and then you want them to keep speaking because they they you want to learn more about whatever it is they're talking about and I said to myself if I'm ever an educator that's the kind of educator I want to be and then the scientist they just knew so much depth and breadth of the universe and I said if I'm ever a scientist I want the command of the subject the way they have it so I this was the beginning of my stitching together stapling together of an amalgamated role model no one individual serve that for me it was pieces of various other people which is quite it gives you protection later on in case one of them gets busted for drugs or something you don't care you just care about the little slice of them that you that you respect so so now I wouldn't necessarily know how to do that but I knew that was a goal state if I was ever put in that position and I can tell you what is kind of hard-earned over all the years contrary to some people so are you just a natural have you asked me what if I have hard I've worked have you can we have that conversation before you assert that what I'm exhibiting is just something that comes naturally my first interview on John Stewart I saw he was one of these guests yes my first interview on on The Daily Show I studied how many seconds he let his guests speak before he interrupted them and I got the rhythm of that and I said if I go I'll ever go on a show I will parcel my cosmic knowledge in these bits so that I will complete a thought before he interrupts and that way when he interrupts there's a complete thought and then we can laugh at whatever joke he makes so that there's a stable trajectory through that interview I did this ok ok that's a good [Applause] one more ok so so first time I'm on the evening news it was 1995 the first exoplanet had been discovered that planet orbiting another star and that was banner headlines so they sent a camera to the Hayden Planetarium my first year as director in fact at the time I was interim director and they didn't know me from it what was before or after you banished Pluto I just went oh yeah she sued oh yeah the Pluto incident came later okay so nobody knows me from anything the NBC sent the camera just to interview with the director who was me so I give them my best professorial it's the 3:00 in the afternoon this is for the evening news so they so how do we discover this I get my best professorial reply I said it's the Doppler shift and and it planets don't orbit their host stars the planet and the host star orbit a common center of gravity which is not centered in the center of the star so while the planet does this which you can't see it's too dim this this this the host star does this the kind of jiggles like that so I'm describing all of this and I went home called everybody mom pop go watch on the evening go home and that I watched The Evening News and all all they had of me was me doing this so I said oh they don't want my professorial reply they want a soundbite and I said I will never be sound bitten again I'm gonna hand them a sound bite that will fit in their time slot so I went home and practiced you look in the mirror you get someone it's like bark out anything in the universe idea place thing you know Saturn Saturn's rings black holes big bang just say it and I practice three sentence replies ideally it's got to be interesting informative and maybe make you smile enough to want to tell someone else the anatomy of a sound bite and so I practice that so then next time I was they came I just handed him sound bites and a they didn't have to edit a thing and they kept coming back I came to learn and so I was there I'm tasked with serving a curiosity the least I could do is invest some of my brainpower and emotional power to do as good a job as I can and today I've learned even more especially through my radio show Startalk which jump species and is now on television first-ever science-based talk show on television ever it was we it wasn't on purpose it just landed that way so I found it I figured this out I mean I found figured out before I look back and say it was that what I was doing you come to the table with a pop-culture scaffold you know Beyonce is typically you know that who the president is you know what football is you know the things you just know you know she's having twins and you name them oh you tighter I try to name Beyonce's twins but I'll get to that in a minute so so so what I found was everyone cut comes with this scaffold and you are an expert in that scaffold that's the definition of pop culture okay now I realized that since science is everywhere I can attach the science that I'm trying to teach to that scaffold and if you do that they were already halfway there and so so but that takes a huge investment of my time learning the pop culture that would be the common denominator of everyone so I got to watch the number one show got to watch a few episodes of Game of Thrones got to see the Super Bowl all the things that define America I got it sort of get in the middle of that and that helps in that arms my utility belt in every occasion where I want to convey meaning and scientific concepts and ideas and if I have a scientific concept an idea that is fundamentally mind-blowing without any assistance then I just put it out there because it'll blow your mind without any reference to pop culture at all and that's kind of the combination of things that are in the book yeah well those were I didn't actually think you would give tit that was a really good answer also I have to gave tip which reminds me to say which I forgot to say that our Facebook live audience you are welcome to submit questions we will be taking questions from this audience this is live and yes okay what hundreds of thousands of people are watching us um and we will take a few questions starting in about 15 minutes so yeah so the post o to the book so you do all these different forms of science communication you you seem to tweet do you have like a staff of people who supply your tweets so I I mean okay so that is simultaneously a compliment and an insult right to come up to me and say are you the author of all those tweets on your turn why tweet once or twice a day that's not all that might not compared to the President of the United States I have a fraction of his tweets um so a literal fraction is like a fifth of his tweets are reading uh uh so you know I don't forgive my bias but I don't think of ardent New York Times readers as active tweeters you know I just don't connect the two we have a few here yeah I'm saying see what I'm saying see okay uh why do I tweet at all oh you didn't ask you you have the Startalk you tweet you you you are on future worm you are oh that's a kids animated cartoon you I was a character in that briefly you also give science talks so I come just so why why write this book like what were you hoping to accomplish in this form of science communication like in a book you look at this like this is weird he wrote a book uh so I have to explain myself leading up to that so I have a cameo in the movie Zoolander - okay I also had a cameo in the movie Batman vs Superman I also have a cameo in the movie Ice Age 5 yes there were four previous Ice Age movies okay this is with the animated of Ice Age mammals that former herd and they're just trying to survive what I did that because I'm a I'm I'm soft when it comes to an artist who wants to add legitimate science to their craft when they reach for science to participate as one of the forces operating on their artistic muse so if they reach otherwise they don't reach for me I don't know who they reaching for and I don't want to just make it up so I'm there when they call and so now with the book I realize there are people who a headline might have just wafted by in about the universe and you got these fragments we're all busy we'll all have full lives you got kids a job school and so I thought to myself something needs to be out there that could put a coherent umbrella over all those bits and pieces that you were words like exoplanet like dark matter dark energy a multiverse colliding black holes you've heard these terms and you've read fragments of those stories you didn't read the whole story because you're in a hurry but you know these words and I thought to myself I need an offering for the people who are curious who who retained some fragments of information but are desperate to consummate their relationship with the universe and so this is a conduit for that for that for that for that effort and and I try to blow your mind with some cosmic phenomenon every 20 pages or so if that's Mike and you say in the introduction that you think there's an appetite for it because you think that people are really more open now to science and than ever before and and at and I had I had like maybe this much to do with it I mean consider one of the great movies of the last couple of years was the Martian which had so much scientific accuracy and it had first-run actors but marki director Ridley Scott Markey budget and this is science stories being told not only that you have these biopics rate lately with the theory of everything the Stephen Hawking story was the other one imitation game with Thank You Alan Turing and so but what it means is the gatekeepers of the storytelling have recognized that scientists are people too and maybe we have stories you can talk about and not just the troubled author or the troubled military general or what a troubled head of state they're they're interesting stories because scientists are humans with the almost the full range of human dynamic that goes on with anybody else almost and so and you go back to the 1950s all the sci-fi movies they were scientists in them but they were just behind a slab or something with a lab coat it's a professor is the asteroid going to hit and they say no or yes whatever then they're done and then they move on to other characters who you care about more so the stereotype has been this is not someone who you want to base an entire film on so I think we've come out of that and access to science is greater than ever before and in important ways especially because artists are reaching for it that's how I know it is entered pop culture but here's my question about that so since the election we've talked a lot about the partisan divide that there's clearly this divide in our country I mean and and we have scientists who are really concerned that science is being ignored and you know what is the fate of empirical thought and so I mean is that is that is there like one part of the population that's really into science now in one part that is and what can what can we do about about that yeah I so you know I have a cop-out answer to that and it's the answer anybody gives and this is not original nor even illuminating but I'm going to give it anyway so so while I think access to science is greater than ever before and the number of people who think about science as a fundamental part of their daily lives is greater than ever before and I think the demographic that knows it best are those who are basically 30 and under certainly 25 and under that community has only ever known a world with smartphones and I think to a person they know that that smartphone requires brilliant programming engineering space with GPS and it is it is the founding principle of their lives their social life their their capacity to interact to learn all of this so if you remembered from the from the voting patterns that demographic voted differently from everybody else and so I I'm gonna say the rare thing that no adult has ever said in their lives I can't wait till the next generation takes over alright there's a never before uttered comment in the history of the world I can't wait till they take over because they're more scientifically literate than from what I've seen than any generation that's come before and they'll fix everything okay all right well while we wait for them while we while we wait for them to grow up no I wanted hurry up I want to talk about so the Earthlings will grow up and we can talk about other Plaxo planets yes in fact anyone born after 1995 when the first exoplanet was discovered I want to Knight them generation exoplanet that's what I want to do so we have actually a very short video clip the x produced about exoplanets that i think we're going to show now okay well show it uh it it'll be up there and down here um or we can just talk about them if it's not going to come on up here it is the discovery gives us a hint that finding a second earth it's not just a matter of if but when so so coincidentally our first facebook live question has just come from Katrina Davis who asks how long do you think it will be until humans move to another planet I mean is that happening as it has this changed your mind about the possibility of humans going somewhere else No oh yeah we're not going anywhere does it look like we're all ready to move off of Earth does it do you have any evidence of this at all it's gotten kind of bad here the US okay no I'm just being sincere okay just I know unless unless unless there's some military reason to colonize Mars or we find oil on Mars because its atmosphere is already a hundred percent co2 so who cares if you're more there I don't I I I'm so I'm a sort of skeptic in that regard I don't I don't see it happening by the way just I have to be clear if I can back up a few a few moments the issue about whether the New York Times refers to these skeptic deniers these climate deniers as skeptics are deniers is is a variant it's more important than I think anyone on the editorial staff recognize because a skeptic looks at all the evidence and finds out where the scientific consensus emerges and then they adopt the scientific consensus that's what a skeptic does a skeptic is doubtful only when there's not enough evidence to convince them and they know how to be convinced by evidence you get convinced and then you move on if you once you see the emergent evidence and you are still denying it you are a denier of a scientific truth that's I want to just make that client taken okay on live Facebook okay so if you say the earth is flat you are a earth sphere denier okay you're not an earth skeptic just let's be clear if you gain weight this week you can't blame the force of gravity and try to repeal the law of gravity for that having happen sorry going pick up what you not going to do that so planets what should we should we care about them well I wanted I wanted yes I want to still research them so that if in another generation we have enlightened human residents of Earth and exploration becomes a fundamental part of what it is to expand horizons looking for solutions to all of your problems as well as finding well the solutions come about because you have to innovate to do any of this and innovations drive tomorrow's health wealth and security so that you get that for free but I want to know if there's if we found out if there's life there that might trigger this nine year old girl to say I want to visit that life and then she will invent a warp drive and then we'll get there in you know a few months rather than 400,000 years are we gonna find life there okay I don't know but there's a whole new emergent branch of my field which you'll surely start reporting on when when we finally have data and it's called the search for biomarkers if a planet moves in front of its host star then the light from That star passes through the atmosphere on its route to us our sight line Traverse is this and so that light is then kissed by the chemistry of that atmosphere it leaves a fingerprint is there carbon there you'll see it oxygen methane you'll be able to notice that and some chemicals in an atmosphere our signatures of act of life on its surface no we can't see the surface but we can see the atmosphere oxygen on earth if you take away all green plants tomorrow the oxygen level will drop to zero eventually because oxygen is chemically reactive it'll just find other things to react to and it'll leave the atmosphere and so oxygen in an atmosphere is not stable but only in the presence of something that's keep continually pumps in we find oxygen on these planets she's going there all right okay so I will leave a couple more minutes I want to leave time for questions but but I want to ask you about this thing that you call the cosmic perspective but before I ask you to go fully cosmic I want to go a little bit more personal so I'm just I told you I crowdsource some questions and I have recently wrote a story about program in New York City that's trying to get young black and Latino students into STEM fields and one of them saw that I was going to be interviewing you and sent in a question and so this is from Brian who's an eighth grader at a middle school in Harlem he said ask Neil deGrasse Tyson how is life like being one of the most well known astrophysicists in the whole US and how does it feel to be an inspiration to many people who struggle with life does he feel that pressure and that's an intense question so he's in eighth grade he's at eighth grade yeah asking existential questions do you feel the pressure so first what's it like I'll tell you it's like so I've I can quantify Fame okay it's not how many times your name is in there it's how many strangers walk up to you in the middle of the street and want a selfie we're in the day who want an order total strangers that's a number and you know 20 years ago it was a couple a week because I've been on some PBS then I've been interviewed locally and then it went to a few a day then it went to sort of 20 a week and then 250 a week and then a hundred a week and right now it's several hundred a day no matter where so one of the biggest changes for me was I have to be a little better groomed each day [Applause] I got a lot of questions about the mustache not the mustache I got a shave I got a do I have Bo today I got it so so that's an extra effort each morning that I didn't have to previously put in because someone wants to take a picture they're like right up under my armpit and I don't want to be smelly no I'm sure I'm serious so this is time out of my day that I didn't have to spend previously so there's probably a whole book I have not written because of personal hygiene that I now invest okay just so I want little bit of sympathy there uh and about how people feel or respond to me I don't think about that actively because it's not I don't I'm not what I don't do what I do to have that effect because that would imply that I wake up in the morning and say how can I know I'm a perfect day for me is when the phone does not ring and when my inbox is empty that's a perfect day and I can stay home play with the kids watch a movie on the couch with popcorn with slightly too much butter and just veg but what happens is I get called I get called by the press because the universe flinched I get called by a school they call by a city but by organizers of a theater you know or lecture halls and they want to learn about the universe and in that capacity I'm a servant of the public's curiosity about the cosmos and in in that way I'm not asking myself how am i affecting you I'm simply offering all that I can and all that I know of this beautiful universe in which we live and that's that's what I do and why [Applause] but I think that's a good note to move on to the cosmic perspective we have just have an image of Saturn I will of the earth well can we see that we have that justice that's and then can we see the next one which is so maybe you can explain to me yes so we have right now as spacecraft orbiting Saturn that's been there for a dozen years but we have sent it into its death spiral to plunge a fiery death into the ball of Saturn because it is it's outlived its useful life and it's called the Cassini spacecraft and for the first time just a couple of weeks ago the death spiral took it between Saturn's ring and Saturn itself we had never sort of crossed that so we didn't know if the spacecraft would survive so they aimed certain sensitive instruments back the other way so that they're not hit by any particles that might destroy them so right now this death spiral will continue through September and I think it's mid September or so that's when it will plunge in and die but it's gotten tremendous data not only of Saturn's rings Saturn itself Saturn's moons it's one of the great triumphs of the NASA program as well as the collaborations with the European Space Agency and what we see in this photo is see that dot in the middle that speck that is earth seen through the rings of Saturn and that harks back to the 1990 photograph that Carl Sagan encouraged NASA to take when the Voyager mission passed Neptune the farthest planet from the Sun and he convinced it to turn its camera back towards Earth and that would be what earth would look like as photographed by aliens coming upon our solar system and it was just a pale blue dot and he published a book called the pale blue dot where he wax poetic and philosophical and political and cultural about the significance of seeing a everything we care about everything we have ever known contained within just a few pixels of a photo so you can think of this as an updated there's a pale blue dot 2.0 as seen through the rings of Saturn we're going to take questions so if you want to line up at the microphones um if we can raise the house lights to see what you guys look like but while they're coming you talk about the cosmic perspective at the end of your book and you're talking up about kind of two things like one is like where we where we are in the universe is back but you also talk about why kind of why we should care about space when we have all these problems here on earth yeah so that's a common common mantra people cease NASA doing these things but we have these problems on earth why are we spending it there when we should be spending it here and and I understand where you're coming from but in my judgment it is an under informed perspective because suppose you were back ten twenty thousand years ago what would you be saying you'd be saying don't leave the cave until we solve the cave problems but I want to go over the mountain there could be no no that's dangerous and the Hadza cost solve the cave problems first before we leave the cave that would have been you back then not only that you think the dinosaurs should have been looking up at some point with an active space program they'd still be alive and we'd all be dinosaurs in this room one of the ways our species will end will be from forces from space while you're solving the problems on earth you then go extinct you see these and not only that the planet to our left is Venus with a 900 degree runaway greenhouse and the planet to our right is Mars which used to have running water but now does not they're dried meandering river beds of flood plains river deltas all the telltale signs of water coursing over its surface gone bone-dry today we don't fully know where that water went we think a lot of it may be permafrost but what we do know it's not on the surface anymore and these are planets that flank us in our journey around the Sun if you're going to say let's solve earth problems the solution might very well be when we compare our planet to other planets that are nearby not only that there are other solutions that can emerge from the exploration of the unknown that can have application tomorrow that is undreamt of today and we don't have time for me to give all the good examples but I've written about this in an op-ed titled of science and America you just might hit a video of that first but then look for the up edie you'll find it and you can read it there okay let's take a question good good you can start dr. Tyson thank you very much for coming to speak to us thank you you're wearing one of the few actually legitimately sanctions shirts with my name on it out there in the in the universe let's make America smart again yes okay [Music] thank you is a Valentine's Day present for my girlfriend who's also here I had a question about astrology actually we know that astrology was debunked about 400 years ago and yet I have many friends who consider themselves to be scientifically literate who still post oh well the Sagittarii should do this and Libra should do this I'm such cancer etc etc how why is astrology she's still so pervasive in modern society and how can we disabuse otherwise scientifically literate people of its efficacy uh so if if you are suggesting that Sagittarius the moon or the Sun and Sagittarius is affecting your life no matter what else you know in this world you are not scientifically literate okay period so don't tell me these are scientifically literate people who say this they're not scientifically literate okay hey B this is a free country people ought to say think believe what they want the issue is if someone who thinks that way rises up and then controls agencies with science literacy matters as part of the decision-making that's where the real unraveling of an informed democracy might occur what do you do with that like I said I I'm an educator so I'm not thinking of beating the adults over the head be they just sort of regular adults or politicians I go back to the educational system and say we are missing a piece of this curriculum that needs to teach people what science is and how and why it works and why it is the most powerful way to decode what is true in nature that anyone has ever devised that needs to be in there somewhere and once you do that and you emerge as a voter you will never again vote for someone who is scientifically illiterate and so but yet you can maintain you can maintain whole colonies of scientifically illiterate people you'll just never be voted into office that's all thank you I know that you're next but I actually I'm gonna I want that that young person to ask a question first but and how old are you you're ten cool well thanks for coming tonight cool hat - okay have astrophysicist ever seen a black hole yes and no next question no so we have a complete mathematical description of a black hole and you really want to avoid them when you go space traveling in her warp drives you want to map all the black holes in the galaxy the problem is how do you see something that does not emit light well one way you can see it is it it distorts the fabric of space and time in its vicinity so as you're travelling through space you see a star field if all of a sudden the star field starts distorting madly there's a black hole right there take a quick left and avoid it if you're okay there you just keep going now another way we detect the presence of a black hole is if a star or gas cloud wander too close and if you get too close to a black hole the black hole will eat you and a star in its later years can expand the Sun will do this and ultimately engulf the orbit of the earth might have a nice day yes okay so so as the black hole flay's the star that's a grown-up word it means two skins the star alive yes that mature is what the word means I'm pretty sure okay they the gas virals down and as it spirals down it heats up and becomes so hot it begins to radiate and it radiates ultraviolet and x-rays so x-ray telescopes telescopes sensitive to x-rays rather than just visible light can find these black holes all across the galaxy so that's how we find that's how we find black holes and so if you're going to go on a spaceship get the black hole map before you go okay okay yeah go ahead okay so first I want to save it I'm terrified so excuse me if I have to cough so about our closest star a red dwarf about 4.25 light years away about 4.25 yes well one of its planets is habitable as in it's in the Goldilocks zone of technically but it's currently locked to be meaning it can't spin because of the gravity of its star now why doesn't that happen to mercury being as it's so close to the Sun oh very good see if I go right to answer that question the whole lead part of your question is is like shows a lot of research that you've done and it's not common knowledge the entire lead-up to your question is not common knowledge so so I'll go straight to the answer but I wrote an essay called tides and time and you can find it on the internet probably I think on my website tides and time which will be related to this so if you have a planet or anything that's orbiting close to something else that has strong gravity tidal forces will slow down its rotation so that will only show one face to you one face to you and so when that happens it's called being tidally locked we have locked the moon there's a far side of the moon there's a near side of the moon but there is no Dark Side of the Moon alakay what Pink Floyd told you in 1973 okay so um Pluto and its moon Charon are close to one another they have double tidally locked they show the same face to one another as they move around mercury does not and it's because mercury has a resonance okay mercury feels the gravity of other objects in the solar system in particular Venus and when you feel another source of gravity in addition to that of the Sun the Sun does not succeed in totally tidally locking the planet there's a there's a tussle between the two objects thank you and I'm going to have to research half the words of that oh okay okay okay thank you yeah so so we only have a few minutes I want to go to soundbite mode so you can see how well I do with scent remember I told you what I did in the mirror remember I told you that so we could move how many we got six people left online so it's okay on literal lines six people left on lines yeah okay I'm no Jon Stewart the in the forensic accounting world of which I'm a practitioner by the way dr. Tyson yes what we would call a subject matter expert we have subject matter experts of various fields talk to each other you mentioned a little bit life sciences with those rays that common we can measure the atmospheres here on earth regular people how do you coordinate and cooperate with other multi-disciplinarian approach and what do you find from those interactions from those multi-disciplinarian Sciences that are not necessarily your subject matter that's a perfect question NASA was one of the first out-of-the-box to engage in this activity and it created a funding umbrella called the origins program where you want to think about the origin of life the origin of the earth the origin of the solar system people had to come together the geologists the biologists the chemists the astrophysicists and once you have a common funding umbrella people talk to one another and whole new journals emerged out of that a journal of astrobiology a journal of astrochemistry these are the kinds of results of the cross pollination that takes you to places the separately so stoked high fields would have never reached themselves so we I think we were one of the first out-of-the-box it needs to happen in every profession yes thank you okay good yes so my name is Orion and I'm 10 years old so I wanted to the name is Paul Ryan yes like in Orion the Hunter so your question so why does your voice get distorted when you get near a black hole why does what get destroyed why does your voice get distorted when you go to neo black hole Oh your voice no no one will hear you're in space so you can try to talk but in space not only can no one hear you scream no one can hear you get ripped apart by a black hole either right so other things get distorted like the shape of your body which would should be a far higher priority of yours than wondering if your voice changes I wrote a whole book called death by black hole which is exactly what you want to read okay we got it we got just got to keep going got to keep going yes dr. Tyson thanks what you're doing for logic and scientific literacy I appreciate that I was shocked this week to learn that a friend of mine attended a Christian University where they teach that the earth is 6,000 years old and she said to me well she wasn't sure if it was true but what does it really matter and I get her point in that she wakes up she goes to work she comes home who cares what do people like us do to convince her that it does matter I want ideas to maybe get you sign a book to her but but any other ideas you have yeah sure no like I said I'm a big fan of free speech the fact that evidence that we're in a free country is that you can have a whole legions of people thinking the universe is 6,000 years old that's created in six literal days these are the fundamentalist religious groups and part of the founding principals of the country was that people can come here and express whatever religion they want the problem is since we have a plural pluralism of religions that the right wait is a blur we are religiously pluralistic thank you thank we have a plural plurality of religions as a consequence of this freedom to express religious beliefs so what that means is if someone rises to power with influence over legislation and they want to legislate that the universe is 6,000 years old they're taking their personal beliefs and then forcing it on everyone else who doesn't share those beliefs and the difference between an objective truth and a personal truth is that an objective truth is true whether or not you believe it whereas your personal truth may be true for you but someone else can have a completely different truth so all it means is we should not encourage those people to have power over others with pivoting on that belief system we already know what kind of country that makes it's called a theocracy and this country made sure that we went as far away from any kind of governing system that has sort of a dogmatic foundation to it which includes religions or deep political philosophies where they're insensitive to criticism you have things like Nazism that so it's religion is not the only force that you would completely change what kind of country you have if it became the governing body its dogmatism that does it something that is no longer open for conversation or or change so all I can say is I don't you don't see scientists picketing churches even if you have people who are religious trying to pick at the school clock the science classroom all right it's a non two-way street there because we respect what they did try just tell them give them an if they stiff them statement if they want to continue to believe this and this spreads in the county and maybe the state they're pretty much assuring the bankruptcy of their state going forward because innovations in science and technology where you understand what science is and how and why it works will be the drivers of tomorrow's health wealth and security and if you're not a participant on that frontier you will be sick dead and invaded this is a hypothetical hypothetical situation right hypothetical so I need to go yeah he's very famous he needs to go oh I'm sorry I got I got I was double-booked tonight I'm sorry thank you so much for being here okay I'm sorry everybody else on the line there yeah okay sorry thank you wait one quick thing where we wait on tricking your head Rick come up on stage cuz you cuz you are you are on the question line let's do this quickly what was your question cuz you on the back of the line you got you got an elbow into the front of the line next okay you're the nine-year-old girl who said that your dude you were good here um I know that no one's ever seen inside of a black hole but do you have any predictions what might be inside of a black hole I don't but the people who came up with the mathematics of a black hole do and there is a way to fall into a black hole where you're not ripped apart in a bloody string of atoms so so we can place the okay so so there are some if you spin a black hole there's not a singularity there anymore there's like a doughnut shape thing so in some cosmologies you can go through a black hole and time will change for you time will go slowly and for the rest of the universe will go quickly and you will see the entire future history of the universe unfold behind you and a whole new space-time continuum opens up in front of you so it may be that black holes are portals to entire other universes the problem is no one has yet volunteered to double-check that okay ladies and gentlemen I gotta run [Applause]

Channel: TimesTalks

Views: 368,376

Rating: 4.8125138 out of 5

Keywords: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Amy Harmon, Cosmos, Hayden Planetarium, Star Talk, American Museum of Natural History, astrophysics, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Id: QmOT6-MfK14

Length: 65min 35sec (3935 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2017