A Conversation with John Hodgman

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, where I also serve as director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium. And joining me on the show today is Charles Liu, a friend and astrophysicist with the City University of New York. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. Oh, it's great to be back. Thanks so much for having me. Charles, you got that smooth as butter voice. You did radio in your day, isn't that right? Yes, I did. Classical, jazz, news, even a little bit of punk one night. So the punk dude was punked out. The opera show ended and the punk guy didn't show, so I played 45 minutes of Angry Samoans on his behalf. Cool. So many of you, if you don't know John Hodgman by name, you certainly know him by face. And we'll get to that in just a moment. But he's got a couple of books. One of them is Areas of My Expertise, but my favorite of his is More Information Than You Require, which is satirical almanacs that fake newspaper reports and historical stories with really complex charts and figures. He also writes for Wired Magazine and New York Times Magazine and Paris Review, among other publications. He's a prolific guy. He doesn't just do stand-up. Now, you might remember him and recognize him, because he appears regularly as a resident expert on The Daily Show. They bring him in as an expert on whatever they need an expert for, and he's the expert. And one of his TV shows is Bored to Death, where he plays a literary agent. He actually started his career as a literary agent. Not many people know that. So truly a talented man. But you wonder, how does a literary agent ever become a comedian? This is the question. I've known him best, though, in the Mac versus PC ads. Oh, right. And when I had him in my office, and we started talking, I could not resist. I simply could not resist. Charles, I had to go straight out. Of course. And attack him. Yes. Because I'm a Mac guy, and he's PC. Yes, you are. So I had to go there. All right. Was that okay? I am looking forward to it. Okay, here we go. John, I have to confess, being a Mac user since 1985, when I see you, it's like, eek, eek, eek, PC, PC. What the radio audience cannot see at the moment is that Neil is actually stabbing me at this moment. He's not just making the psycho noise, he's stabbing me with a knife. Send help, I have you beat. I've been a Mac user since 1984. Is that right? You can't be a Mac user earlier than that. I had a 128K Mac that I convinced my father to buy for me. Well, you made an awesome PC dude on the TV commercials. Thank you very much. Well, the reality is I was an avid Mac enthusiast. Indeed, I would literally get into bar fights, not fist fights, but fights with words while drunk, in bars, 1994, 1995, when I first moved to New York, my friends and I would go see a good friend of mine, Jonathan Colton, perform songs at McGovern's on Spring Street. I know Jonathan Colton. He wrote a song about Pluto's moon, Sharon. Yes, yes indeed. A beautiful song. It's a love song. Pluto's moon, Sharon, was upset that Pluto was demoted, but said, but I'm still your moon. Yes, but Sharon has left Pluto now. Well, that's the follow on song. Yeah, you know moons. Okay, so you know Jonathan Coulton's music, and so then what happened? Yeah, he and I went to Yale University together, you see, and we were very good friends. Friends of mine, including him, would get into long drunken arguments about Mac versus PC, and they're the same arguments that you make today, and I always took the Mac side. My feeling was that technology should conform to us rather than us conform to technology. That is so correct. And so I went on like that, and then I worked in an office environment, and I had to learn to use another platform. Okay. And then I ended up buying one of these things. I had had a Mac 128K, then I had a Mac SE, then I had a PowerBook 145P. You never had the Mac Plus then. I made the quantum leap from the 128K to the SE, which had a hard drive, which was very exciting. Internal hard drive. I remember it because I was like, what is a hard drive? What's going on? You mean I don't have to put in a floppy disk? That's half the fun. So that leads me to the next- Then I had to buy a PC. I'm sorry about your next question, but I need to finish this. We need to get through this together. I had to buy a PC, I thought, in order to do my work from home, for my office job as a literary agent. So I struggled mightily with that platform for a long time. I was all for it, but then I learned all of the problems. Like I had sort of thought I had matured and come around and said, you know what, you can use this other thing. No. By 2003 or early 2004, I realized, no, thank you. So you had- It was Colton who made me go back, actually. He bought one and said, you should try this again. You had it deep within you on how to behave like PC. Yeah. No, I had every gag that they came up with or that I helped to improvise on came from a deep personal pain. Deep insight. Right. I've also flown on airplanes and seen businessmen working on gigantic non-machintosh laptops. And I know those guys. And you pity them, you pity them. No, I'm with, they're my people now. Oh, I tell you, I feel an instant kinship with John now because I also convinced my father to get a Mac. 1984 was the year and it was a 128K. Only I didn't make the quantum leap. I actually did get a Mac plus later. You did increment your way through. No, John is the true geek among geeks. I am very, very close to him now. So is he, are you about to beatify him now? Is he one of your heroes? He's heading up in there. He's rising in, so what's your definition of a geek? I get different definitions when I ask different people. Well, that's true. I heard that a geek was somebody in a carnival. What do you mean you heard? You are one, so what do you mean you heard? Well, long ago, before I was a geek. Wait, wait, do you agree that you are one? Back when I was cool. Back when you were cool. Back when I was not a geek, I was told. Wait, did you ever, were you ever on the football team? No. No, so what, what do you, how do you define when you were cool? Oh, that's true. Oh, nevermind. Okay, I'm a geek, yes. But the carnival guy who bit the head off chickens, that's the original geek, right? Really? Yeah, somebody who did morbid or disgusting acts while you went in and paid a few cents. Creepy, really weird things. Right, right, right. So I prefer the word nerd. Really? Yeah, tool, wonk, those are all good too. But I think, but you've, I think you've lost the nerd one because the geek movement, the geek squad for, for Best Buy, right? That's true, yes, but you know, It's not the nerd squad. They didn't make Revenge of the Geeks one, two, three, and four, they made Revenge of the Nerds. I thought they only made two of those. No. How do you even know they made four of those movies? Well, Revenge of the Nerds 3 was called, Charles, I thought I knew you, Charles. Revenge of the Nerds 3 was called The Next Generation. Coincidence? I think not. Not to mention the triumph of the nerds, but that's for a different show. Well, because nerds, nerds and geeks in school, it was defined by who would get slammed into the lockers, right? That's right. In gym class, right? That was the dividing line. That's right. And now nerds are the people who write the computer programs that the jocks use to play fantasy football on. So therefore, they have to protect them. Yes. Oh, please get my picture up that little tiny bit percentage, please, so I can win. Let's see what John Hodgman says about the culture of geeks versus jocks. He's done some thinking about this. Check him out. So my read of culture is that geeks and nerds are kind of gaining in stock value. They have to. Well, because they fix people's computers. Well, exactly so. And I think that it goes beyond just the traditional stereotypes of computer nerds, although I think obviously they're more essential to the economy than ever before. I mean, jockism as a philosophy, not just team sports, right, but the whole martial philosophy of working together as part of a team in order to attain a certain goal. And the pleasure that jocks take, submerging their own identity into a team effort that is often very physical is a great way to run a country when you are building things and punching things. That is socioculturally deep. Yeah, well, I mean, that's how you build bridges, right? You need engineers, of course, to design them, but you need jocks to go out there and get it done. What you're saying, as we watch team sports on the weekend, they are our cultural emissaries, in a way. Well, of course, effectively, we're watching combat games, right, which is serving the role that the military used to serve in almost every culture of sort of tribal cohesion and a sense of who we were as a people. The nationalism of the team sports is insane. It's completely irrational. We are the best team because we are the best team. Period, period. And everyone else is bad. And it works its way all the way down to high school sports. We're the best team because it's my high school, not your high school. Well, that's proto-nationalism. That's how nation states have always formed a sense of cohesion. And frankly, let's be fair, that's how they protected themselves from other people who wanted to do them harm. Okay, so now, but we have the geek culture, which- Well, we live in a different time. If anyone does us harm, it's gonna be because they're pushing a button. It's not because a phalanx of warriors are going to come over the border from New Hampshire into Vermont. That actually might happen now that I think about it. That's a bad example. Muskets in hand, yes. I know New Hampshire has long plans to take over Vermont. Isn't that a great newspaper title? New Hampshire Invades Vermont. Yes, oh boy, it's going to happen. And they're going to do it in like 18th century technology. And New Hampshire's license plate, live free or die. Right, exactly. They want to liberate Vermont from the colonies. They're not talking about themselves. They're talking about Vermont. So emergent, we have an emergent geek culture. I think that's great. It's long overdue. That fits the pattern of civilization and the economy that we're in now. Put the high value on intelligence. I gave a commencement speech at my high school some years ago, the Bronx High School of Science, and I titled it Revenge of the Nerds. If the richest person in the world is a nerd, that's all you need to know. Yeah, and they are vengeful people. So, I mean, I think that we need to find a way to get the best of both traits. There's something to be really admired in Jockism, which is a sense of intuitive moral clarity and gut instinct and a decisiveness that really does enact getting things done. On the geek side, boy oh boy, I love my people. But we can go down some pretty crazy ratholes about religion and Firefly or whatever. He's, Charles, he's right about that. I'm afraid so. And just in case any of you out there don't know what Firefly is, it was sort of like a mix between Star Trek meeting Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yeah, there it was, there it was. It was a TV show that became a movie, right, and. You can imagine the religion to which John is referring in that case. But what's interesting to me is that if you think about, say, evolutionarily, jocks represent the ideal of the present, the strong man, whereas geeks represent the promise of the future, the one who will earn a lot of money. But you couldn't have said that 30 years ago because the geek was not making a lot of money. It was the jock who inherited the wealth of their family and took over daddy's job. That's where the money was. Geeks, I don't think they had much hope of owning companies and becoming the richest people in the world. On the other hand, those of, say, the people who immigrated over to the United States from other nations, which were not so prosperous, they would come over because they were well-educated. They couldn't get visas unless they had advanced degrees, had parents in graduate school or something. But I'd say now the patron saint of geeks is Bill Gates, and he's worth a gazillion dollars, or 50 billion. Well, Steve Jobs is really up there, too. He's up there, too. He's up there, too. And you know what I find fascinating is what I just, maybe the last person in the world to see the social network, just saw it a couple of days ago. And the end credits, it describes Facebook being valued at $25 billion. Mark Zuckerman is the youngest, Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world. And what I find interesting is he's portrayed, and I think accurately, as kind of socially awkward, yet he creates the most socially connective software the world has ever seen. Right. Just because you can't necessarily look at somebody in the eye when you're talking, doesn't necessarily mean that you don't understand human interaction on a very deep level. I think it most times means that. Maybe you have no choice, right? The one exception. I always like thinking about whether a president is a geek. Ah. Obama, you know, he talks about science every now and then. Doesn't he collect comic books or something? Well, we can find out after the break. John Hodgman knows Obama well. Yeah, do you know why? He was selected to be the comedic entertainment during the White House Correspondence Dinner. Oh, a tremendous honor. A tremendous honor. I was back in 2009. When we come back, we'll find out just what John Hodgman had to say during his comedic rant in front of Obama. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Joining me is my colleague, astrophysicist, Dr. Charles Liu. Thank you so much for having me here. Whatever my geek credentials are, they are geek squared when it comes to Charles. So I brought him on for this, because we're interviewing John Hodgman. He came to my office, it was a few weeks ago, and we just sat there for like an hour and a half, just chewing the fat. And he's a very deep thinker about a lot of different things. Well, you know, comedians are. In a sense, comedians have to be the biggest geeks of us all, because they have to see who we are, see through it, and then make us laugh about it when they talk. Back at ourselves. That's right. Right, and he does it brilliantly and in a kind of demure sort of way, like he's coming out of, like he had Quaaludes or something. So you gotta sort of be calm with him. So did you know that in 2009, for the White House Correspondents Dinner, he was selected by the White House. That's fantastic. To be the entertainment for the dinner. That tends to launch people's careers too. I agree, I agree. Right there for President Obama. And so I was curious about this and what he talked about and how that works. Let's see what he tells us. By tradition, the comedian usually goes before the president and the president- Reacts. And reacts to the comedian. Yes, but our president did not want to do that because he did not understandably want to be held responsible for anything the comedian might say. So I was told for the first time in the history of the dinner, I was going to follow the president of the United States. Which was fine with me because as you know, I am the most dynamic public speaker of our generation. So there was no question- Your scintillating prose just would run every time. And the thing about our president, of whom I am a supporter, is that not only is he good at so many things, and he is obviously a politician, a good basketball player when he's not getting hit in the mouth, but he is a great writer. He also has tremendous comedic chops, which just gets really frustrating after a while. And then I had to get up there and follow him and get killed. What's your best thing you said that night? My favorite thing was referring to his Spock-like calm and his obvious prosthetic ears. That's good. I was able to show a picture of Mr. Spock and say, there's another prosthetic ear enthusiast, Mr. President. I'm sure you're a fan. Because I was testing him on his nerd credentials. On his nerd geek credentials. So does he pass your threshold? Well, he's the first... No, not really. Well, okay. Enough. I tweeted about his busted lip. Yeah, I tweeted about it. I said, evidence that the president is a geek is that playing basketball at the White House, he got 12 stitches, he got hurt. And then people tweeted back saying, no, that means he's a tough player. I said, no, 12 stitches in the NBA, you're a hero. 12 stitches in a pickup game at the White House, you're a geek. I'm sorry. At least he didn't have an asthma attack. I would have. That's another geek feature, right? Do you have asthma? Yeah, I hurt my back just doing this radio show. I'm going to need some Bengay. He melds the two worlds of Jockism and geekdom. In ways that others hadn't. And I hope in a very productive way. But he was certainly, I think, one of the first mainstream politicians to basically throw up geek signifiers in a way that I think tells a lot about where we are as a culture now. He gave the Vulcan salute and he made references to Star Trek and he made passing references to comic books. And I'm not saying that he's got all this stuff at the tip of his fingers, or even that he has total overriding enthusiasm for it. I think he's probably more interested in keeping the economy together and the country together. I think it tells something about where we are as a culture that this was even allowable. And not even something to criticize, but to celebrate. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think that's terrific. Even though he did not know the name, supposedly he was a collector of Conan the Barbarian comic books, and he did not even know the name of the deity that Conan believed in by Crom. Is that the name? Yeah. I didn't know that either. Well, see. But I wasn't a collector of the comic books. No, because you believe in science. You don't believe in Crom. We'll see, come Judgment Day, come Crom's Day, which one of us was right. By Crom, we'll have that president's head. I had no idea who the featured god of Conan is. Oh yeah, Crom. Eternal Battle with Tarim and Erlik. Charles, you scare me. You wanna follow StarTalk Radio, you can do it online. You can like us on Facebook, StarTalk Radio. Just find us there, we're there, easy to find. And of course, we tweet the show. StarTalk Radio is our Twitter handle. I tweet the universe at Neil Tyson. You can find, tweet no more than one or two a day, so I don't overload your inbox there. But Charles, do you agree we have a geek president on our hands? Oh yeah, yeah, I think so. So I wonder if geek becomes the norm, then there could be things like the geek chic. Have you heard that phrase? Oh yeah. You've heard it. Oh yeah. I only heard it recently. Oh no, geek chic is great. You gotta wear the dark horn room glasses with a piece of tape in between. Oh, so it's celebrating the culture. Right, absolutely. Although I like nerd chic better, but geek chic rhymes. You're still on your nerd thing. I am, I'm sorry. The term nerd is still my favorite compared with geek. Oh, so let's get back to presidents. Who do you think was the geekiest president? I think Clinton was the first to wear a digital watch. Oh. A digital wrist watch. Yeah. Well, that would put him in the cat. That's a start, that's a start. Oh, no question about it. For sure. But you know, so many of our founding fathers really were geeks. Jefferson, my bet, for sure. Jefferson played the violin, come on. Okay. John Adams, socially very awkward, obnoxious and disliked. Benjamin Franklin was known more in the round the world as a scientist than he was as a statesman. But he was, like, drank and womanized and... Is that part of the stereotype? Well, the physicists, yeah, try to keep up with them at some party sometime, my goodness. Let's find out what John Hodgman has to say about his own ranking of geek presidents. Theodore Roosevelt was probably our geekiest president before Obama. Okay, well that's interesting to know. But he was kind of a self-hating geek because he was a good, sickly, asthmatic child. That's number one criterion for geek childhood. A natural, natural historian from childhood. So do you think he overcompensated in his later life by going on hunting expeditions and... Completely, I mean the whole strenuous life was him trying to fix himself from being a sickly, young, asthmatic child. What Sarah told me was that he called his own bedroom the Theodore Roosevelt Museum of Natural History. As a child. This is Sarah the historian, not Sarah Powell. Not the other hunter who's out there. Yes, exactly. Teddy Roosevelt, he's the patron saint of the American Museum of Natural History, where I work. Yes, indeed. He built it with his own hands and teeth. Do you know why he built it? To put all his stuffed animals that he shot. It took a person who slaughtered innocent woodland creatures to then tell us all that we have to conserve them. What better way to conserve them? No, think about it. You put them all in a museum and you say, these are the creatures we now want to protect. Get to know them. Yeah, exactly. What better way to protect them than by tearing the skin off their bodies and stuffing it with sawdust? Just the unlucky few who happen to be in the way of the bullet. Those elephants are now immortal. They're immortal. They've saved countless millions of other elephants. Look, I don't want to talk about mortality, but we all have to face it one point or another. Will you donate your body to the museum to be stuffed and put on display? So not. I want to be buried. So that... Really? Oh, yeah. I don't want to be cremated. I want to be buried. Why? Can I tell you why? Possibility of reanimation, please. Possibility of reanimation. Yeah, me and Walt Disney. Yeah, I don't want Igor putting the wrong brain in my body. Okay, so I want to be buried because I spent my life dining on flora and fauna that has given me the energy to live just as I want to give the energy of my body to the flora and fauna that comes after. You want to give back. I want to give back. And if you cremate yourself, you burn, you become heat, it heats the atmosphere, it radiates into space, nobody can use your body energy. I'm a fan of the circle of life. You have just changed my whole opinion. Is that right? I'm just this is what I'm going to do. When you die. Well, I'm not going to die, but I was thinking about when my cat dies. John is out of control there, man. Well, you know, you have to realize that, yes, when you die, you want to be buried and give your energy back to the earth. But if you get cremated and burned, your energy goes back into the larger earth, the universe. It goes back to the universe for sure, but no other living creature can use it. That's the problem. On earth? No, still not. Still not. Nobody's getting my infrared photons moving through space from earth. No. You sure? Yeah, I'm pretty sure about that. All right. Yeah, that's not going to happen. Well, it could be reflected back down onto the ocean. I want to give it to the microorganisms that are currently in my gut that are waiting to dine upon me sitting right next to the burial plot. Oh, but did you know actually that when you die, many of those flora and fauna in your gut die too? They'll die too, but that's fine, but they'll be consumed by others ready and waiting in the burial plot. Okay. I promise. So no fancy protection or preservation for you. No, not the lead coffin. I don't really want to be in bomb, because that just delays it even further. Yeah, I think it's a great idea. I think when I die, I'm going to ask my family to just drop me into the Passaic River. How's that? That works too. Okay. They eat and buy fish, whatever fish. The Passaic River. Why? How about the Amazon or the Hudson or someplace noble? The Passaic? Well, the Passaic. You live in Jersey, right? Yeah. If I take it to the Amazon, then that means you have to put me on a boat or a plane. So? When we come back from the break, we're going to find out just what John Hodgman thinks about killing a bee-eating lobster. We're back, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson with Charles Liu. Charles, I can't believe I had a 10-minute conversation with John Hodgman about boiling lobsters, and I gotta go straight to it to tell you what it's all about. Excellent. Here we go, let's find out. Do you cut a lobster in half before you put it on the grill, or do you boil it? They're both horribly cruel. Yeah, we boil it first. Exactly so. Head first, yeah. Oh, really? Do you have strong opinions about this? I do. So head first? Yeah, totally head first. Do you think a lobster feels pain? Yeah, a little bit, and briefly. But they have copper hemoglobin, so they have green blood. You're gonna have to explain what difference that makes. What? When you're being boiled. No, I'm just. Well, I guess it's not so bad. I do have copper blood. It's just a bit of biology that people might not know or appreciate. Yes, indeed. That lobsters have copper blood like Spock. Oh! I see. You didn't know? Well then, so that's why Spock had green blood and the rest of them. When I'm eating a vulcan, I like to suck the meat out of the ears. I'm gonna pit the vulcan first. Yeah, a lot of people don't think it's worth the time and effort, but that's some sweet meat. So just as you know, when copper oxidizes, it turns green, and when iron oxidizes, it turns red. That's why we have red blood and vulcans have green blood, as do lobsters and other crustaceans. What benefit do they get from that? I don't know. They still boil like the rest of us. They still boil, you boil them, they're done. Have you heard about this machine that uses high pressure water to shell a lobster while it is alive? That's not right. That is true. And it comes out. Oh, that's wrong. That's just wrong. It comes out whole. It's like the lobster takes its jacket off and it's done. Yeah, basically. That's not right. When I cook a lobster, I remove the rubber off of its claws. Oh, to give it a fighting stance. So that it can try to bite me as I try to shove it into the water, just to give it the last attempt. Do you also explain to it? No. And do you think that that gives it comfort? I'll try it next time. All the lobster knows is that you have taken off hurty bendy things and is now going wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, and then pain and then death. That's what it's gonna be like when the aliens come too. They're gonna be like, we're gonna be nice to these people as we destroy them. And we're gonna be very confused. It's like, wah, wah, wah, it's gonna sound like the teacher in Charlie Brown. It's probably for the best. Yeah, it's crazy. Do you know, he gave a Ted Talk? Really? He gave a Ted Talk on the Fermi Paradox. Impressive. Yeah, let's find out how that sounded. Let's go. I was talking about alien visitation. And it was spurred by the Fermi Paradox. Which is? Well, Enrico Fermi, Famous physicist. Famous physicist and creator of the atomic pile, which is a weird technicality. It's a weird phrase. Because technically all piles are atomic. Do you know what I mean? Plus, it is kind of odd to put on your business card, I invented the atomic pile. That's just, that doesn't even sound nice. Except it wasn't Italian. So he sat down at lunch one day and said, basically, if the universe is this vast, the likelihood of there being other civilizations in this universe somewhere is pretty high. It's gotta be high. Right. So the question is, where are they? So if it's that high, they should have been here by now. Right, exactly. And so your conclusion was? That he's an alien. Based on what evidence? He looks like one. He looks like one, because you know what an alien looks like, and so therefore he looks like that. Have you ever seen a picture of an alien? Of course, they have almond eyes and big triangular head. Slits for mouths. Slits for mouths and very wimpy little bodies. If you ever saw- Wouldn't it be cool if an alien came with big muscles? We never draw that. That's true. Well, one suspects that if an alien actually gets here, its muscles will be in its technology and it will no longer need to flex physical muscles. This is part of our fear factor. They beat us with their brains, I guess. That's what's gonna happen, don't you think? All right, so he looks like an alien. What other evidence do you have? Well, wouldn't an alien want to convince other research scientists that aliens are not already here? It's just, look, it's one plausible theory. I mean, the other plausible theory is that they're on other planets, which are far away. Oh, rather than here. There are aliens, they just haven't. Or that they went through a mass extinction event long before we came up. I mean, just because there have to be a number of civilizations, we also are dealing with huge amounts of time. Okay, so there are out there, they just haven't visited because they're too far away. They're too far away, or they blew themselves up. I didn't know a lot about Fermi's Paradox until I had to write a piece for Wired Magazine. And then I became fascinated with it because it really did depress me. I think they've actually studied Earth and have concluded that there's no sign of intelligent life. What hubris it is to suggest that we would want to be visited in the first place. Exactly, you know. I can't go there, I'm sorry. Think of the amount of energy and resources it would take to reach this planet. What would be gained? They'd have to totally get return on that investment, and the way I've seen humans behave, I don't think it's there. You know, the traditional alien abduction mythos is that something happens in your life that is so weird and incomprehensible and sort of incongruous with normal everyday life, that it can be no product other than alien abduction or intervention, we're talking about lost time. And that's called argument from ignorance, where I don't know what it is, therefore it must be intelligent aliens from another civilization that came to visit us. Right, exactly. Which is odd, because you just admitted you don't know what it is. Right. That was the only way that I could explain, for example, as a teenager, going to see the movie Dune and having a girl talk to me. Like that had to have been. An alien encounter. An alien encounter, because what human female would talk to me, nevermind, why would she be going to see the movie Dune with her mother? That's weird. That was weird. That'd be the first mother daughter. Mother daughter Dune outing. Outing ever. Yeah. Okay, so that's good evidence. That's the best evidence you've given yet. What is the likelihood that there is civilization? Near certainty. Near certainty. Oh yeah, the universe is large, it's been around forever, and the ingredients of life is everywhere, and life started pretty quickly on earth, and earth is not as earth, it's just earth. So, anyone who's- Whoa, how dare you? What a, earth is just earth. It's the speck. I brought my torch and pitchfork, by the way. You start removing the centrality of earth from the universe any further. I will round up a mob. I was not the first to do that, I assure you. So, it's a certainty. Put aside your questions. I have questions for you. Listen, it's a certainty. I would say- What about, I'm just curious of your point of view because you've obviously given us some thought. Civilization, is it something that we simply can't imagine what it would be like, or do we think it would be primate-like? On another planet? On another planet. No, look at Hollywood. Every alien they show, it's got two legs, two arms, a neck, a head, shoulders, mouth, eyes. It looks basically human. If you were a jellyfish, the aliens would look indistinguishably from humans, if you're a jellyfish, right? Because they have all the total features that we have. So if there's life form from another planet that visits Earth, and it has no DNA in common with us, it better for sure look more different from us than any other creature on Earth looks from us. Right, so it could look like Enrico Fermi. Enrico Fermi, nice Italian boy. So Charles, this green blood, what color is your blood? Mine is red because it's got hemoglobin in it. Lobsters are green because they have hemocyanin. It's an earlier version of hemoglobin. It's only about 25% as efficient as hemoglobin. So basically, lobsters never needed to evolve red blood. The green blood is actually less evolved than our red blood. And it's working fine for them. For them, yeah. They have an exoskeleton, they're kicking butt down there. They live 70 years, 80 years, yeah, they're doing great. You know, John Hodgman also has a podcast where he's judged John Hodgman. It's crazy, it's crazy. I have to find out what's that about? Let's find out. Judge John Hodgman. And I rule. You rule. People come to me with their disputes. And? And I tell them who is right and who is wrong and how to live their lives, which is something I'm very good at. And a couple of young women came to me with a very weird dispute in which they had picked up a toy giraffe in a street fair in Tokyo when they were on a student trip together and they had lived together as roommates and sharing the giraffe and enjoying the giraffe. It is a small robotic giraffe, not even robotic giraffe, it is- Mechanical. It is a mechanical toy called Jeffrey. They were fighting over who gets to keep it. Because they are separating, they're no longer roommates. Right, one of them is going on to graduate school in computer science in the Stanford University, a good school, and the other one is going to art school. I said, look, you can't let the one who's going to art school have that giraffe because she's just gonna end up selling it for food or marijuana. Because there are no, there are street musicians, there are street performers, there are no street engineers. That's true. No street scientists, you know. I'll solve your equation for you. No, because they're employed doing it for real. Right, no busking astronomers. That's right. You're about the closest thing there is to a busking astronomer. Busking, I feel very Shakespearean with that word. You could go onto the subway platform and give a lecture and I'd buy your cassettes or whatever. So Judge Hodgman. Yes, but here's another thing about robots. There were these two guys who called it, both of whom are computer scientists. They've had a longstanding fight about whether or not a machine gun is a robot. And the argument for this definition was that a machine gun does a repetitive task that a human could not do on its own, that it is programmable and that it can go from automatic to single fire mode and burst mode apparently, which more than I've ever known about. Yeah, because if you shoot too many, you'll go off target and you waste bullets. Why do you know this? This is, I'm just saying. Let's table that for further discussion. I can't tell you too much, but go on. And the third thing is that he wouldn't want to fight a machine gun. Oh. And he doesn't want to fight a robot, so that's his criteria, which is all faulty. Obviously, a machine gun is a tool. It is not a robot, but a machine gun is the first thing you'd want to fight. Yeah, a human has to operate the machine gun. It has no autonomy whatsoever. But when the singularity comes and the machine becomes self-aware, then we're going to have a problem. Then they start taking people out. Exactly so. So tell me about your familiarity with burst mode on machine guns. Physics is the study of matter, motion, and energy, which is central to the interests of the military. I see. And so it turns out they found that a gun, because there's such a recoil into your shoulder, that if it's on full automatic, your shoulder can be taken out of direction for where you want to point the gun. Oh, I see. So it pulses them like two or three at a time, maybe four at most, and then you get to re-aim and pulse again. Otherwise, the bullets fly, and they found out that a lot of ammo was wasted because the gun had a mind of its own. Sorry. Charles, what do you know about the Fermi paradox? Well, it's very simple. If there were aliens that could even travel a small fraction of the speed of light, they'd have basically taken over the galaxy. Maybe they already have. Well, we should be able to see them with telescopes. But we don't. That's right. No, nothing's waving back to us at the other end. And the possibility, of course, is that maybe by the time you get good enough to get that technology to explore the galaxy, you wind up destroying yourself instead of actually exploring. Wow, okay. So it's a self-limiting prospect. Exactly. So all these advanced civilizations just are extinct because they had the power to destroy themselves. We've got to take a quick break, but more StarTalk. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and with me is my colleague, astrophysicist Charles Liu. So Charles, we have John Hodgman on the show. He came to my office, I spent like an hour talking to the guy. We're just bringing you the best clips to the listeners here. And one of our favorite topics was whether robots would ever take over, or robot aliens. And you were saying before we went to the break that aliens, there may be a reason why they haven't visited us, because their technology is so potent. So potent, that's right. That the desire to explore and the desire to conquer may be so similar that if you say have technology that can get your spacecraft moving at a high percentage of the speed of light, instead of making a spacecraft, you'd actually make a cannon. And then the cannon will wipe out your enemy, but then your enemy wipes you out at the same time, and therefore you lose your space. So what you're saying is the urge to explore and the urge to conquer may be linked to the same gene. Well, we hope not. If geeks rule the exploration, then maybe we don't have that war jockman. Right, because geeks don't ever go to fisticuffs. Well, yes, that's right. That's what John said. Not that I've ever seen. We do yell very loudly about which Star Trek captain was better. Does that count? Well, I thought that was obvious. Let's find out what my interview with John Hodgman revealed about his thoughts regarding robots taking over and alien invasions. Do you think robots will take over one day? You're talking about the singularity. Well, do you tell me? How dare you boomerang that back on me? Well, as you know, I am mainly aware of popular culture interpretation of advanced technology. And all I know is that futurist slash transhumanist slash keyboard inventor Ray Kurzweil is taking 1,000 vitamins an hour in order to stay alive until the singularity can happen. And the singularity is, I believe, when artificial intelligence becomes self-aware and enough to be self-replicating. And at that point, I think robots take over. And we become their slaves? We become their slaves, or we're able to transfer our consciousness into a robot body. Leaving us unnecessary, as was the plot of The Terminator. Yes, exactly so. Skynet goes online as soon as Ray Kurzweil goes full cyborg. I don't know what's going to happen. So what was your question? Are robots going to take over? Do you believe that that is the future? I think that it's probably more likely that robots will take over than aliens invade. That's only because aliens aren't going to bother to get here. And the robots have an investment. So when the robots take over, then the aliens might come and meet the robots and think that's sort of the organism of the Earth. Look, we're all going to be in a lobster pot by then. Sure, maybe. There's that episode of The Twilight Zone where it's a cookbook. Oh yeah, to serve man. To serve man. Exactly so. Yeah, the aliens came and fattened us up and gave us new growing methods. And the wheat harvest was as big as ever and everybody's happy and fat. And they didn't have to work anymore and they shipped them off to get eaten. You know what psychologists know? That what scares a child the most is not dying. Robots. No, no. It's not simply the act of dying or getting shot. It's getting eaten. That's why they fear big monsters because a monster will eat them. They don't fear guns. They don't fear traps. They fear things that will eat them. Usually when you're eating, you die also. No, yeah, that's true. That's true. But it is that particular method. The method of death. Do you think that it is a child perceiving that its existence is limited that is so scary or the feeling that it is going to be chewed up and swallowed? I have to go with the chewed up and swallowed. That is the hallmark of being eaten. And so what I wonder is if as adults, we capture some of that fear with aliens. Five minutes you're telling me how much they're going to put us in their lobster pot because we'll then get eaten. You didn't say they'll vaporize us with their ray gun. So maybe you're still a kid and you think that the biggest fear is that we're going to be eaten by aliens. Of course, we're a childlike race. We're largely irrational. There are very few of us who even stop to contemplate our mortality and then those of us who do think we're going to go to a special place afterwards so therefore we don't need to worry about what we do on this planet. That sums up the world. You have to agree with me on this, right? If they ever do find us, they are so technologically advanced. We are worms beneath their feet. Unless they are extremely politically correct, they are going to. But why would they come here? We've used up all of our resources. We are not very smart. Maybe for comedy. Maybe they don't have comedy. That's the answer. No resources would go to we to anybody else. Let me tell you how we are going to handle. First, handling alien invasion. Recall all the probes. Or you know what? At least stop putting plaques on them with naked men and women. Because that's going to make us look like we are walking around naked all the time. Wave and hide everybody. Do you know what I'm talking about? The plaques are a problem. That's an invitation to disaster. For some listeners, the plaque, he's referring to the plaque on the Voyager and on the Pioneer space probes that escaped the solar system. And it's got an illustration of a naked man and a woman on it. We need to stop sending pornography out into the universe. What are they going to think of us? It's not pornography, it's National Geographic specials. So Charles, what's your take on all this? Well, look, fear of technology is not a new problem. You remember the song, The Ballad of John Henry? Of course, one of my favorites. He's a man, he's going to beat the steam drill, right? And he winds up dying with a hammer in his hand. He'll beat the steam drill in hammering railroad ties. That's right, through a mountain. And I think he does beat the steam drill. He does beat the steam drill and then he lays down and he dies. And he dies. That's right. So I have great optimism that we're not going to lay down and die. We are creating Watson. I mentioned earlier, remember the... Watson, the IBM computer that competed on Jeopardy. That's right. And wiped the floor with Jeopardy's greatest contenders. Yeah, but a VW Beetle wipes the floor of me if I'm running. He beats me anyway. The technology which we've created helps our lives. And if we are wise about using it, we will be just as much helped by Watson in the future as we are by VW. Why can't we be friends? Why can't we be friends? All right, Charles. So you're hopeful that the technology will just continue to serve us rather than make itself our master. Very much, very much so. Well, this is good to hear. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson and as always, I bid you to keep looking up.