November 9, 2017 9:04 pm

Friday, We Serve Up Another Cosmic Bowl of Galactic Gumbo… Recorded Live!

Oh, it’s time for another sweet, spicy, cosmic serving of galactic gumbo. Recorded as a special, invitation only Facebook Live event at Sessanta restaurant in New York City, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice are in the house to answer fan-submitted Cosmic Queries on numerous topics from marijuana legalization to general relativity.

First, inspired by a member of the audience (pictured), Neil and Chuck explore Vincent Van Gogh’s masterpiece The Starry Night and discuss how it was the first piece to capture the “feel” of the universe. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve seen The Starry Night in person once, and although my line of vision was semi-blocked by numerous tourists taking photographs, when you see it in person you really get the essence and depth that you can’t see in a reproduction or through a screen.

Next on the menu: marijuana legalization, and Neil raises some good points about why it shouldn’t have been illegal in the first place. Later courses include an investigation of the differences between general relativity vs. special relativity, how astrophysicists measure the distance between celestial objects, and the theory of the multiverse with a side dish of “meta-verse.”

My favorite part of the episode was the discussion about life on Mars. If we found life on Mars, the impact on humanity is currently unpredictable, but it would change the very nature of what we think “life” is or can be. As Neil says, there are three options: we find no life on Mars, life on Mars will introduce a new kind of life, not connected to Earth, or we find life that shares similarities to us, pushing forward the theory of Panspermia.

Those are just some of the highlights than came from a great night at Sessanta, thanks to the team at Facebook Live. Be sure to tune in, and be on the lookout for the next time you can be an audience member at a live StarTalk Radio event!

Please join us tomorrow night for Cosmic Queries Live: Galactic Gumbo Edition at 7pm ET right here on our website, as well as on our channels on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn. If you’re an All-Access subscriber, you can watch or listen to this episode ad-free at 7pm, too. And remember that you can also catch next week’s StarTalk Radio episode one week early on TuneIn, at tunein.com/startalk.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Ian Mullen