Cosmic Queries – Black Hole Universe

Paul, there were a lot of cosmology questions in there.

Big Bang Multiverse, Black Holes.

Negative Gravity.

Yeah, people are into that.

Yeah, I see you as a negative gravity person.

Tend to be negative.

Coming up, Cosmic Queries on StarTalk.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

This is going to be a Cosmic Queries Grab Bag edition.

And to help me get through these questions, I got Paul Mecurio.

Paul, how are you doing, man?

I’m doing well.

It’s Baron Paul Mecurio.

Baron?

Oh, yeah.

Sorry.

Not Baron, as in you cannot reproduce.

Your womb is barren.

No.

I actually am.

I’m trying to keep that on the rack.

You have one son, so that’s the evidence.

By the way, look at you all dressed up like a little schoolboy.

Look at you.

I dressed up for you.

Clearly, you have no such reciprocal feeling for me.

Well, because you asked me to help you move furniture.

So that’s what I did.

Plus, like, you’re out of a job.

I’m out of a job?

What the hell happened down there?

What did you do?

What did you do to piss off Paramount?

I broke CBS and Paramount, apparently, on The Late Show.

You’re on the staff of The Late Show.

I work on The Late Show, perform on the show, and we’re not going to be in existence come May.

And I am going to be sleeping outside, living in your bushes, looking for any nickels I can find.

I live in Lower Manhattan, I don’t have bushes in my backyard.

We’re going to get you something.

Yeah, so, you know, I’m looking, you know, whatever.

All right.

If you know anybody.

Well, if I know someone who needs a lawn mower.

Ex-lawyer.

Ex-lawyer?

I forgot.

You went to law school.

Investment banker.

I could do M&A deals and make you laugh and make you ravioli all at the same time.

Come on, but I’m barren.

Case people are wondering during one of our Patreon exclusive segments, one of our Patreon members, where they get to view a Q&A session live, felt sorry for Paul Mecurio for not having a title.

And he came up with a great one.

Commensurate with Lord Nice of Chuck Nice.

So he got knighted some number of episodes ago.

So they felt pity upon you and said…

As a lot of people do.

And so they decided to call you barren.

I thought barren, that feels right.

Barren Paul Mecurio.

I command presence, I have a presence, I command attention.

I felt that work.

And so I happened to have Excalibur in the office.

Why wouldn’t I?

I got Excalibur.

And so we knighted you.

Barren Paul Mecurio.

Cut me on the neck eight stitches, but otherwise it was great.

So I’m honored and I want to thank the Patron Exclusive.

How did you know he was an accidental cut?

Ha!

Ha!

What makes you think that was an accident?

I need security when I come on this show.

Tamsen’s got my back.

So we’re gonna do some…

Yeah, let’s do some Q&A here.

All right.

Just some general grab bag.

But you’re least employed through June, is that correct?

Through May.

May, okay.

May, unless something happens and I screw something else up and get us fired earlier, but May.

All right.

And I’m also doing my off-Broadway show Permission to Speak, touring with it, and we have it on Patreon now, so people can go and enjoy it there and support it, because I don’t have any money.

I’m poor.

I’m out of a job.

You know, I’m eating hay, if you care.

I’m a baron.

I shouldn’t be eating hay.

I’m a baron, okay?

All right, here we go.

Opal Lehman.

Hello, everyone.

Opal from Atlanta.

I’m 15 years old and was wondering, you said recently that we only know 4% of the universe.

Well, Neil does.

We know more.

4% of the universe, which includes everything we know.

So do you think there are more types of science out there left, sorry, to create or discover, or would the rest of what we would know about the universe just be branches of what we already know?

Love that question.

Yeah, it’s a great question.

Ooh, good one.

Good one.

So let me not just, let me never say that something’s just a branch of something else.

That makes it sort of subservient to it.

Let me give a slightly longer answer than you might have bargained for.

Beginning in the 1990s.

You know, it’s bad when Neil says it’s going to be a long answer.

Stop.

In the 1990s, NASA realized that there was some scientific questions that needed answering that did not sit comfortably within the known body of knowledge.

So, yes, but certainly not even within the siloed sciences as they have been laid out.

As we’ve come to think of them in college.

You’re majoring in chemistry.

I’m majoring in physics.

I’m majoring in it.

I’m majoring in that.

Nature doesn’t draw those boundaries.

We did.

So, one of the questions was origins.

Origins of life.

Is that just biology?

No.

Life began on a planet in a solar system.

Could it be stellar or?

No, no.

Just the forces operating on this.

And how’s a biologist gonna answer that question without knowing what the sun was doing at the time life began or what Earth was doing?

And so, what NASA created were these origin centers.

Rather, they created funding umbrellas, origins funding umbrellas where you could enter into the room with the figurative room from all these different branches of science.

And they would come together and ask questions of each other.

Because they’re interdependent to answer some of these questions.

I don’t want to call that a spinoff.

I want to say that’s a whole brand new way to explore the world.

Right.

So, an extrapolation or an extension of…

So, yes, there’s new sciences to be plumbed.

I don’t want to think of them as an entire branch of science.

I’d like to think of them as new things out there where people with different expertise may have to come together to address those questions.

And I would say, that being said, probably the newest science out there is neuroscience.

We’re in our infancy.

And I look forward to when it’s in its maturity.

Then we nip, tuck, and fix all your, especially your mental problems.

Well, you need a nip and a tuck.

You really do.

That’s not even a real mustache, anybody.

What about AI?

Does AI potentially bring us to, not either through the use of AI or AI itself, other types of science or the uses of various sciences?

I haven’t seen AI, that doesn’t mean it won’t still happen.

Right.

But AI at its best today, I’ve yet to see, discover something that was not otherwise on the internet.

Or put together, it’s putting together things on the internet.

But suppose you had a thought that no one ever thought of before and it’s not on the internet.

Does AI have access to that thought?

The answer is no.

Could AI come up with that thought?

That’s my question.

If it can’t come up with a thought that none of us have ever had nor have ever put it on the internet, there’s a limit to where AI can take us.

But my thought is a manifestation of several things that I know and the chances are, statistically, that AI knows some of those things as well.

Of course.

Not just the chances are, it does.

Provided those things are online.

Right.

Statistically, it could probably formulate the same question.

Not as good as mine.

Definitely.

My point is to make a completely new discovery.

Could AI come up with the general theory of relativity?

Could AI have invented Cubism?

Cubism doesn’t look like it came from much before it.

There’s no early Cubistic paintings of Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo.

Can you tell me what branch of science we can use that compels people to take their bike on the subway?

It’s a bike.

Ride the bike.

It’s not a moving bike rack.

I don’t take my car to the airport and check it on the plane.

It is a little weird.

No, it’s a lot weird and it needs to stop.

It’s a little weird.

I don’t care if you live in New York or don’t.

Try to get it out of your way.

They’ll lift up the front wheel, they’ll tuck it to the side where the door is.

Yeah, and the handlebars end up my butt, and that’s not what I paid $2.90 for, whatever I’m paying.

Okay, so the neuroscience surgery will adjust that first in your brain.

Don’t defend it, please.

Daumir de Silva.

Hey, Dr.

Tyson.

Oh, this is from Brazil.

Brado Zalanzo, Brazil.

Assuming I got this right, we can intuitively think of hawking radiation as matter escaping a black hole when a pair of virtual particles is created outside of it.

The antiparticle.

That is precisely correct.

Okay, so you got that part right, and you get a dishwasher.

The antiparticle falls into the black hole, and it annihilated itself with its counterpart already in the black hole.

This sounds like a movie.

Leaving the other one loose to fly away.

And since particles don’t have identity.

There’s a big adjustment there.

It wouldn’t have to be the antiparticle, but one of those two particles would fall in.

One of the two.

And since particles don’t have identity, it’s like that particle just escaped from the BH.

My question is…

The BH.

He’s on a friendly basis with the black hole.

The black hole ever told me I could call it BH.

Well, someday you’ll be cool enough.

You gotta hang out with the cool kids to hang out with the BH.

The question is, why do black holes favor antiparticles?

The creation of virtual particles should be random, all the time, every direction, so it should be 50-50.

Yeah, and my understanding is that’s the case, as is his understanding.

If I’m wrong, I don’t know why I’m wrong.

So, because when the antiparticle pair is created, the momentum that they have is in random directions.

So, it’s by quantum design, random.

So, they have to go exactly opposite directions so that their momentum cancel, okay, into that spot.

At the same speed?

Well, sorry, it depends on what the momentum was of the photons that beget the particles.

The point is, everything has to check out in the end.

And when it checks out, check out meaning arithmetically balance out.

So, my understanding is you could just as equally have an antiparticle in the black hole as a particle.

If it’s not that, I don’t know why it’s not that.

And if that’s the case, we gotta check with Jan 11 on that.

So, yeah, his whole question is predicated on something that I also don’t think is true.

Which is?

That only the antiparticles fall back in and the regular particles escape.

But we don’t have proof of that, isn’t that the case?

No, I’m saying, if it’s true that only the antiparticles go in, I don’t know why that’s true.

Any understanding I have of particle pair creation, they fly off in opposite directions and that set of directions are random to each other.

So you can just as easily have a regular particle going in as an antiparticle.

So he’s right to be suspicious of this.

Right.

It should be 50-50.

I’m thinking yes.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

Got it.

All right.

Great question.

This is Pratik Nagar.

Hello, Dr.

Tyson, my name is Araya, 12 years old.

I’m from Salt Lake City, Utah.

I love watching your explainers and the fun and knowledge that comes with it.

While in class, the question came up in size, which are we humans closer to?

The universe or an atom?

I was very intrigued by this question, especially because atoms are incomprehensibly small and the universe is incredibly big.

If we are closer to the size of the universe, could there be a time knowing that the universe is expanding, that we are closer to the size of an atom?

Cool question.

Yeah.

I’ve actually answered that question in my next book.

Whoa.

Called Just Visiting This Planet.

And I will read you that question and answer from my book.

Okay.

If I may.

Yes.

Can someone pass my computer?

Go ahead, read me a bedtime story.

May I read you a bedtime story?

Yes.

So, as you may know, for 12 or so years, I wrote a question and answer column for the public under a pen name Merlin.

That’s why I have Excalibur in this office.

I didn’t know you did that.

Because me and Merlin go way back.

You’re tight.

You’re like this, literally.

We’re tight.

We’re totally tight.

And so people ask Merlin these questions.

Merlin was the pen name.

So here it is, if I may.

Dear Merlin, I am six feet tall.

Comparatively speaking, which is the farthest away from my eye?

The atomic particles in my little toe or the most distant galaxies?

That’s the same question.

Right.

Since you’re only six feet tall, there is no doubt that the distant galaxies are farther from your eyeballs than your pinky toe.

Another way to address your inquiry, however, is to imagine you suddenly became 10 times taller, 10 times taller again, and so forth.

After about 25 of these stretching exercises, your head will brush up against the most distant galaxies in the visible universe.

Returning to your eyeball, imagine you now shrink in successive steps, so that each shift takes you within one-tenth of the distance to the atoms in your toe.

So we increase by factors of 10, decrease by factors of 10.

It would take only 15 shrinks to enter the nuclei of your toe atoms.

Adding the two sets of jumps reveals that the entire known universe spans about 40 powers of 10.

In one direction.

No.

If you add them together, it’s 40 powers of 10.

But this seems…

From small to large.

And I don’t mean this…

So what this means is you are closer to the atoms in your toe.

It’s only 15 powers of 10 down.

And it’s 25 powers of 10 to the edge of the universe.

Right.

And I’m not trying to…

That’s the only way to answer that question.

This seems like, and I’m not saying this to be pejorative…

How about that book is Just Visiting This Planet.

Available October 2025.

Okay.

Not available in paperback.

This seems like an obvious question that doesn’t even need to be asked.

And I don’t mean that to be mean spirited, but to me, I’m a complete lay person.

The answer was your toe.

Of course, it’s 15 versus 25.

No, you didn’t know that in advance.

These are powers of 10.

I understand, but there’s no question that the atom’s in your toe.

If I take a tape measure, the toe is six feet away, and the universe is 14 billion light years.

Right.

If you want to say it’s obvious, the answer is obvious, that’s what you should be citing.

But in powers of 10, it’s not obvious.

But this question wasn’t in the context of powers of 10.

But that’s the only sensible way to answer it in the way they were debating it in their class.

Elevate yourself to the level of the 12 year old.

Man, you’re asking a lot of me today.

That’s impossible.

Okay, so online, there’s a, on YouTube somewhere, it was there, there’s a 10 minute movie called Powers of 10.

Made in the 1970s, 78.

And it starts with a man laying down at a picnic on a, in a park outside of Chicago.

And as we start with a scene one meter wide and one meter tall of a man with a, and every 10 seconds we’re gonna go 10 times farther away.

And we do that.

You see how many jumps, and it’s an early CGI, but it wasn’t even used computers.

It was very well done in its day.

10 times farther away.

Every 10 seconds, and you go to the edge of the universe.

They said, now, then we zoom back and it says, now we’re gonna go 10 times closer every 10 seconds.

And so you go 10 times closer.

And it takes fewer 10 times, it’s 10 times, right?

And that’s all I’m saying is it’s obvious that that would take 15 10s to my toe.

You were not thinking in powers of 10 to justify saying that.

You don’t know what I was thinking.

That’s true, I don’t know what you were thinking.

And that’s why this relationship is never working.

We need marriage counseling.

Because you don’t bother to think what I think.

So I think we hooked up a guy with his answer.

Very good question.

Yes.

And this is 12 years old, amazing.

All right, this is Master Builder EJ.

No, but he’s one of our fans, so it’s not amazing that he says that.

It’s expected.

I can’t even give a compliment.

All right, average question, 12 year old.

Try better the next time.

That’s Neil talking, not me.

I thought it was amazing.

Hello everyone, this is Ethan Henning from Houston, Texas.

I have a question about power sources.

What would be the best power source for a moon base that would have the purpose of mining and sustaining the lives of astronauts for six months?

Could it be fission?

Maybe it’s solar.

I would love to know what you think.

I love this podcast.

It’s my favorite.

Ask me why I’m dressed up.

I lied to you and said I dressed up for you at the beginning of this.

Why are you dressed up?

Because hours ago, I was on CBS Mornings, their morning show.

Oh right, I fell asleep during that segment.

They asked me.

So I get dressed up for TV, but with a little bit of, you know.

Yeah, when you come on the late show, which I work on, you wear a tie or you get your vest.

Yeah, I show some tie or the vest, one or the other.

Both would be.

A little much.

It would break the lens.

So people will bleed from their eye sockets.

So they asked me about nukes on the moon.

And first, we’re making portable, not quite the right word, transportable nuclear power plants that could fit in a truck, for example.

If it can fit in a truck, it can fit in a big rocket.

And these are nuclear fission power plants.

We’ve talked about this on the show, needing portable nuclear plants to drive AI.

What you would do is, if you have a computation farm somewhere, where AI is intensely using energy, you take it off, you’re calculating for Bitcoin, you just take it off the grid, you may give it its own power supply.

You can’t put it near a waterfall or this, and then you don’t know if the sun is shining all the time.

A nuclear power transportable power plant, the word plant overstates it at that level.

Power station, power station, then, yeah.

Yeah, that was the expert that we had on the show who talked about it.

There’s gonna be a lot of those.

We did, so right now NASA is considering fast-tracking a nuclear power generator and about the size that I described, and one of those would give you 100 kilowatts.

Are you kilowatt-fluent?

Yeah.

You’re lying about that.

Okay, no, no.

KW?

See, I know.

I’m not dumb, I’m smart, I’m not dumb.

Let’s become fluid together, you ready?

Yeah.

So 100 kilowatts, kilo is what?

Thousand.

Thousand, so 100,000 watts.

Okay, that’s the power that it can generate, 100,000 watts.

Do you know the power drain of a hairdryer?

I’d say a kilowatt.

Yeah, a thousand watts, okay?

So how many hairdryers could a hundred kilowatt power generator?

100,000.

I’m sorry, what’d you ask?

I wasn’t listening.

Apparently.

100,000 watts generator.

Your hairdryer draws a thousand watts.

Oh, 10,000, yeah.

Wasn’t that the question?

Start from scratch.

All right, okay, go ahead.

100,000 watts, a kilowatt, okay?

100,000 watts.

A hairdryer uses a thousand watts.

So how many hairdryers can this sustain?

It’s a thousand.

You’re just pulling it out of your…

100,000 watts.

So the hairdryer’s a thousand watts.

It can sustain 100 hairdryers.

Right.

Okay, so that’s the energy level that NASA’s looking at to create and send to the moon right now.

So it’s not some Mondo power plant.

It can keep 50 hairdryers going on the moon, okay?

And by the way, you wouldn’t need a hairdryer because it’s 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

That’s true.

Just stick your head out the window.

Just stick your head out the window for a second, right?

It’ll completely dry.

So these power plants at that size and with that wattage can run for 8 to 10 years.

How do they deal with maintenance and that kind of thing?

No, no.

These are this new generation.

There’s no maintenance.

No maintenance at all.

And it’s a very fissioned and how it distributes heat and it’s not going to over…

It’s fissioned.

It’s nuclear fission of fissionable uranium, which is not the same uranium as you might learn from a explainer we did on isolating uranium for energy or for bombs.

So there’s how pure the uranium is for what your use might be.

It’s got to be really pure if you’re going to make a bomb out of it.

If you’re going to make a power station, it doesn’t have to be that pure.

And so it’s much more readily obtainable.

So you…

So nukes would do it for eight years.

You never have to maintain it.

If you had solar panels, by the way, no matter where the sun is in the sky, on the moon, it’s just as bright as it is anywhere else, because there’s no atmosphere.

So the sun is just as bright on the horizon as it is directly overhead.

So you can have solar panels that just track the sun.

It’ll get 100% sunlight, as long as the sun is above the horizon.

Do you know how long a day lasts on the moon?

24 hours.

A month.

It lasts a month.

What is a month?

What do you think the word month came from?

Have you thought about it?

No way.

How long it takes the moon?

Ah.

Okay, that’s how long the moon goes around the earth.

But as it does that, it has, and it goes through phases, as it’s doing that, it’s experiencing a lunar day.

So a lunar day is a month.

A month long.

Okay, so two weeks.

I thought you had a speech impediment.

That’s why you stared at me like, what is he saying?

Like a dog?

Yeah, exactly.

So two weeks of sunlight, two weeks of darkness.

So you got two weeks of solar power generation.

Problem is, if you exceed your power needs, the energy’s gotta go to somewhere, so put it to storage batteries.

When it’s dark for two weeks, okay, you might wanna use the energy.

However, batteries don’t work well in the cold.

As soon as the sun sets, the temperature drops from 200 degrees Fahrenheit to 200 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

We haven’t been able to come up with a battery that can do it.

We haven’t.

You’d have to like insulate the batteries and have some other heating source, so.

Just put a Tesla up there, take care of it.

Have you driven a Tesla in the winter, the battery?

Took me an hour to get across town when it should have taken me five minutes.

So yes, nuclear fission makes complete sense, given what we’ve done with it lately.

You can create a reactor and just send it to the moon.

One last question on this, then we’ll move on.

So how do you protect the reactor from whatever, something could hit it, what could happen on the moon?

Yeah, a meteor could hit it because there’s no atmosphere and there’s nothing protecting you.

Meteor could also hit you.

You could say, we finally have it protected.

Bam, you’re dead.

No, I’m coming to your house and I’m gonna just hide under the couch.

Yeah, so a big enough meteor you’re not gonna protect, maybe you could bury it, for example, protect it that way.

How far away are we from this, realistically?

The military already has prototypes that they’re using, of just the size I’m describing.

And so I think we’re very close, within years, not decades.

Yeah.

All right, let’s move on.

Next question.

Derek Evans, Dr.

Tyson, this is Derek from South Windsor, Connecticut.

I know where that is.

Longtime listener and attendee of live events.

Nice, thank you for coming to us.

First time Patreon supporter.

We give three or four live events a year, typically in the region, one in Connecticut, the Beacon Theater here in Manhattan, and we sometimes go to Jersey and to Philly.

But yeah.

Those are great.

I think you need a juggler at the beginning of it, just to kind of loosen things up.

In a recent conversation.

There’ll be you, you also juggle.

Okay.

I’m gonna do anything come May.

Yeah.

Whatever you, in a recent conversation you had about Micro Black Holes, it had me wondering about interstellar travel.

How could you travel vast distances while being sure to avoid these tiny black holes?

And what time dilation or other unintended consequences would exist?

Or do they radiate away fast enough not to pose any problems?

So the larger the black hole, the slower it evaporates.

It’s obviously the inverse is then true.

As the black hole gets smaller, the rate at which it radiates increases and grows exponentially.

As it gets smaller?

As it gets smaller.

So it gets smaller, it gets smaller faster still.

Because it’s compressing on itself?

No, it’s not compressing.

It’s because its rate of evaporation has to do with its surface area.

And the smaller it gets, the more surface area it has relative to the volume.

It’s an interesting fact about the geometry of surface area going as R squared, radius squared, and the volume going as R cubed.

The surface area of the sphere.

Doesn’t it decrease as it?

It does, but the volume decreases faster than the surface area.

And why is that?

It’s just the arithmetic of it.

Because the volume is…

Not a good enough answer.

Specifically why.

Don’t duck the question.

Don’t be a politician.

Answer.

So this manifest, I think we have a whole episode on this, it’s on size and life.

So you can ask, here’s a certain surface area you have, and how much flesh is associated with that surface area.

You can do that.

As you get smaller, the amount of flesh associated with the surface area drops faster than the size of your flesh that protects it.

Within the body?

Within the volume.

That’s correct.

And since the evaporation rate is related to the surface area, the rate, it is sucking, sucking, it, yeah.

Extracting?

There’s no such thing as gravity.

Black holes suck.

Sorry.

You gotta, you should put that on a business card.

So, what’s a business card?

Let me explain that.

So as it gets smaller, the amount of volume that’s gonna evaporate out gets smaller faster relative to the surface area.

And so it evaporates in a flash of light.

So, a tiny enough black hole will not last long enough for you to come upon it and then put your life at risk.

Plus, we don’t expect there to be many of them, even if they were there.

And space is really vast and really empty.

You ever see the video, the sci-fi movies where a person’s trying to navigate the asteroid belt?

A duck lift!

They’re great!

They’re that, they’re that!

Even in The Expanse, they did this.

They got asteroids.

No!

You know the average distance between any two random asteroids in the asteroid belt?

It’s like 50 miles.

Some number way bigger than they have ever shown.

So if you’re driving through that, you could literally like use your knee to drive and eat a Big Mac and then eventually…

Put on makeup.

Put on makeup, answer some texts.

The text…

Yeah, yell at your kids in the backseat.

In fact, Pioneer 10 was the, I think it was, was the first spacecraft to traverse the asteroid belt.

Americans, Americans, remain the only country to have probes outside of the asteroid belt.

There was some concern.

Will it survive?

Yes, it has survived.

Of course it survived.

So we packed a lot in there in terms of Derek’s question, or do they radiate fast enough to not pose any problems?

That’s the answer, yes.

That’s the answer because of the dilation.

Okay, got it.

All right.

Lily Rose.

Hello, Dr.

Tyson and Lord Nice, or but he’s not here, all right.

So put in your name with your new title.

Put it in right now.

Okay.

Graph it in, go.

Hello.

Hello, Dr.

Tyson and Baron Mecurio.

Okay.

Lily Rose here from, that really does roll off my tongue.

Lily Rose here from Virginia.

My question is, was the wow audio signal ever solved?

Have scientists determined what was heard or do you have any theories on what it was?

Thank you and love the show.

Yeah, so back in the day when we had chart recorders, there was a radio signal.

By the way, radio is not the same thing as sound.

We equate the two because we used radio waves to transmit audio into a box called a radio, and we associate the word radio with sound.

But radio is a band of light that travels at the speed of light.

Sound is the result of.

You can transmit sound with optical light, as you can do with fiber optics, for example.

They have fiber optics speaker connections to your…

So you have to be clever about the modulation of the electromagnetic signal and know how to read that and turn that into sound on the other end.

So the Wow signal was a radio signal that rose up out of the din of cosmic noise, and then it never rose up again.

How long did it, how long did it…

I don’t remember how long it lasted, but the astronomers on duty, they said, Wow, that’s why it’s called the Wow signal.

Like wow and an exclamation point.

Can I just say something?

What?

You guys couldn’t come up with a better name?

What, holy shit?

No!

What did you want?

I don’t have a six-year-old, name it.

Golly gee whisker, like what’s the…

Gee williger.

And it was before OMG, no one knew how to do that yet.

What’s the speculation on what the source of this was?

If that has been solved with some explanation, I don’t know.

But how close, was there any speculation?

Here’s what to say, if we wanted to be aliens, and aliens should know better than this, you don’t just send out one pulse of signal.

You want a rhythm in there so that anyone eavesdropping on you will know it’s not from the universe itself.

So you can’t do just one blip, and if you send any blips at all, send them at regular intervals.

But it was a consistent signal.

No, it was one blip.

Maybe it was from another star system, an alien left the TV on and fell asleep.

It could have, yeah, sure.

Well, you’re gonna mock me, Mr.

Wow, that’s as plausible as naming this thing Wow Audio.

No, I’m saying I don’t know what it is.

And just because you don’t know what it is, doesn’t mean you know what it is.

Wow, wow, he said wow.

Busted.

Oh my God.

Busted.

It’s not fair that you take acid for these and I don’t.

No, no, just to be clear, there are people who see something in the sky that they don’t understand.

Right.

They don’t know what it is.

And they say because I don’t know what it is, I know what it is.

It’s intelligent aliens visiting from another planet.

No, that’s just people wanting to believe that.

That’s my point.

Just because you don’t know what you’re looking at, it doesn’t mean you know what you’re looking at.

That needs to be a bumper sticker.

Exactly.

Okay.

Has the WOW signal, has that been left alone?

Is anybody still pursuing that?

They went back to the region they couldn’t find anything.

It’s been revisited, as they say.

We’re gonna move on, Conrad Dunphy, Dr.

Tyson.

Conrad Dunphy here from Portland, Oregon.

Portland, love it.

Yeah, on the multiverse-ish JWST, coming out with a lot of data supporting the Black Hole Universe hypothesis.

What is the likelihood that physics within a different black hole would be similar to ours, and if those physics are similar, what would be the first guess at how we escape our black hole universe to visit another?

Wormhole?

Wow, it’s a lot there.

So, there’s only some tentative evidence.

Maybe for those watching that don’t know JWST.

What am I getting, my people?

Oh, you never know.

Just because you don’t know what JWST is.

It might be somebody new.

It might be somebody new.

Just because you don’t know what JWST is.

Okay, oh, okay.

So I’ll explain it for others and not you, because you already know it.

Okay.

Compelled by Paul to bring everyone onto the same page, JWST, James Webb Space Telescope has in one recent measurement found evidence of possible rotation among an ensemble of galaxies, which we don’t expect if the universe is, was born in the ways we expected via the Big Bang, okay?

It would mean there was some net rotation of the universe.

We know from equations that are in one of these books that inside a black hole opens a whole new space-time continuum.

So, a black hole is, however, a Crete matter that circulate toilet bowl style.

We expect black holes to have rotation rates.

Wait a minute.

If our universe has a rotation rate and we are a space-time existing with that and we have a horizon, are we in a black hole?

There’s a chance of that.

You can’t rule that out.

Okay, now, that means we’re in a contained universe with our own laws of physics.

In the multiverse, every multiverse would have slightly different laws of physics.

Quantum physics tells us that.

You don’t want to visit those other universes.

Why?

Because the charge on the electron might be slightly different from what’s going on in your body and you would collapse into a pile of poo.

Totally mess you up.

So, like Star Trek, the whole like transport me, beam me up, it could be a mess.

You’d be a pile of goo, yes.

So if you do find one with, I would dare I say, identical laws of physics, then I don’t mind being the first to step in there.

You would need a wormhole to connect us.

Do you think it’s plausible that there’s one with an identical?

Yeah, if there’s an infinite number, there’d be one with identical, yes.

Do you think we’re ever going to be capable of discovering it?

Wormholing to another universe?

I don’t know.

I want wormholes as badly as the next person.

Maybe you should work harder.

I like the way Rick makes wormholes.

He has a gun or some device that will do.

He uses real science.

Whereas this guy from, who’s this guy?

You know who I’m talking about, Dr.

Strange from Marvel.

He uses magic.

That’s the worst.

No, I’m telling you, it should be Outlaw.

All right, that was a great question.

You could probably do it with a wormhole, but otherwise the universes are not connecting.

Connected and…

That’s kind of what defines them as independent universes.

And even if you could go visit, you’re not sure you want to because you don’t know what you’re going to step into.

Plus, you don’t know if they’re made of anti-matter.

Right.

Anti-matter is not in our universe.

Where did it go if it exists anywhere?

Maybe it made another universe.

So here’s what you do, bring a little coin with you.

You see a person in the other universe, you know, flip him a coin.

If he spontaneously explodes, quickly go back to the universe.

It’s not the same.

No, but the minute I entered the black hole through the wormhole, that universe…

You have to come in contact with other matter.

And space is pretty empty.

Deep space is very empty.

Time for one more.

All right, John Swiley.

Hi, Dr.

Tyson, a longtime listener, first-timer inquirer from Athens, Georgia, with all the excitement around JWST’s discoveries of unexpected…

That would be James Webb Space Telescope.

You’re so annoying.

Unexpected mature galaxies.

A question struck me.

Why does Neil Tyson have friends?

That’s a weird question.

What if we’re not actually seeing galaxies from the early universe, but instead light entering from beyond it?

Not unlike a pinhole camera.

Could the Big Bang have been a narrow portal from a parent universe and JWST is now picking up photons that bled through that pinhole event horizon?

Maybe those galaxies look so evolved because they are.

Thanks for everything.

Or we don’t fully understand the formation of galaxies.

I mean, just have a look at how extraordinary is your explanation to account for a mystery.

Because we have mysteries all the time in modern astrophysics.

So to say there’s a portal to another universe, okay.

But Occam’s razor remains a very good tool to apply here.

Do you know Occam’s razor?

Occam said one ought not posit multiplicity without necessity.

I say that every day.

He still laughs at me.

So how is that relevant to you?

What it means is if you have a complex hypothesis to explain something and someone else is walking around with a simpler explanation, the simpler explanation is probably correct.

Right, but that’s sort of answering the question from 30,000 feet.

So if we’re not actually seeing galaxies from the early universe, but instead light entering from beyond it, not on like a pinhole camera.

Yeah.

So that’s implying that we can see beyond the universe rather than within the universe itself.

So pick, you just make judgment as to what is most likely to you.

For me, extraordinary explanations, as Carl Sagan famously said, require extraordinary evidence.

And while it’s unusual to have these mature galaxies so early, maybe we don’t fully understand galaxy formation.

And the whole point of JWST, why it looks at the universe in the infrared, is to see galaxies being born that emit ultraviolet.

And over the lifetime of the universe, redshift had expanded it until it has become infrared.

Is it a constant that when a galaxy forms, it will always emit ultraviolet?

I mean, there’s so many, to me, as we talk about this, there’s things we think we know but we don’t know, that anything could be happening out there, right?

Yeah, but that’s true, and we have to be open for that.

But if you have some sense of how things do happen, there’s no harm in starting with that assumption.

Right.

Another great question.

No harm.

Yep, no harm.

One more.

It’s a lightning round.

One more.

Okay, go.

Paradox.

Hello, this is Dennis from Salisbury, Indiana.

Dr.

Tyson, if gravitons do exist, shouldn’t we be able to cancel gravity waves when putting them under close scrutiny?

Can an equivalent to the double slit experiment be set up at LIGO to cancel the wave?

So, the bigger story is, if you can cancel out light, such as in the slit experiment, there’s a bright line and a dark line, and it’s bright, dark, and bright, because the troughs add together and we get darkness, and the crests add together and you get bright.

All right?

They’re wondering if you can take gravity, if it’s a wave, cancel it out.

And if you cancel it out, did you cancel out the gravity itself?

That’s an interesting question.

Can you create negative gravity in this way?

Or zero out the gravity in this way?

And I don’t think so.

Why are you hesitant on that?

Well, also, what LIGO is detecting is a change in the gravity, not the gravity itself.

So, yeah, you can surely…

But if you can have change, then you could have negative gravity.

Yeah, in principle.

Isn’t that possible?

Yes.

But we’ve not…

However, is it really negative gravity if it’s just a part of the wave that is a trough rather than a crust?

So, is the negative gravity basically static?

I would think, correct.

Right?

Correct.

Or frozen?

Correct.

And you would need that if you wanted to make a wormhole, because wormholes take negative gravity and expand holes in space time.

Well, therefore, if a wormhole exists, then the negative gravity must exist, right?

No, but you can use negative gravity…

Oh, sorry.

Oh, yes.

Well, I don’t know.

Unless, aliens found another way to make a wormhole, if we see a wormhole out there, somebody discovered negative gravity.

That’s correct.

Okay.

There you go.

That was it.

All right.

Great questions.

Done.

Love you, man.

Thanks for coming through.

Always great to see you.

All right.

And I think I’m going to try to dress up a little bit more when I come here.

I am a baron now, so, you know.

I don’t know how barons dress.

So, this has been another installment of StarTalk, Cosmic Queries Grad Bag Edition with Baron.

Paul Mecurio.

If you see me on the street, please salute and curtsy.

And he’s out of a job beginning May.

May.

And the late show.

Anybody needs their house painted, help moving, I’m handy with tools.

All right.

This is StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

As always, keep looking up.