Cosmic Queries – Cosmic Cauldron

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

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk.

We’re doing a Cosmic Queries edition, and you know what that means.

I got Chuck Nice as my co-host.

That’s right, sir.

What’s happening, Neil?

All right.

How’s it going?

So this one, again, every now and then, there’s the bottom of the barrel.

We pull out of the barrel all those that were solicited topically, but then a few fall through the cracks, and others just come in randomly.

And so this is just some random, it’s like a potpourri.

I think in the past, we might have called it a galactic gumbo.

We just don’t have a good term for it.

How about we’ll call this one cosmic cauldron.

Cosmic cauldron?

Yes.

Okay, let’s try that.

A little juxtaposition, tongue in cheek, a little witchcraft reference with science.

And the alliteration to boot.

All right, so what do you have?

I assume you have a Patreon question up front.

As always, we start with the Patreon patrons, because they give us money.

Let’s do this.

So, yeah, this is Davis Hemsath from Patreon.

He says, is there a hypothesis for the interaction of dark matter and a black hole?

So, you know, I mean…

Yeah, I mean, it’s just because dark matter is dark and black hole is black, don’t mean all the black and the dark got to vote together.

As far as we know, they are completely separate and distinct, as far as we know.

And that, actually, I’m not even saying very much there because we don’t know what comprises dark matter.

And as I’ve said many times, it’d be better termed dark gravity.

It’s something giving us gravity and we don’t know what it is.

Black holes give us gravity, but we know what a black hole is.

So, there’s no obvious connection between the two at all, not only theoretically, but observationally as well.

So, I got nothing for you there.

Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything there.

There doesn’t seem to be a there there.

Not in the dark matter there, right?

Not in the dark matter there, yeah.

And if you want to find out what’s in the black hole, you can go check it out and let me know.

Julia Lyschek, Julia Lyschek from Patreon says this, I have an essay question for you guys.

An essay question?

Essay question, that means it’s compare and contrast.

Yeah, that’s what it’s one of those college essay questions.

College essay questions.

What, in your opinion, is the best all time depiction of aliens in a movie or on TV and why?

Ooh.

Love me that.

Okay, so.

That’s so cool.

I’ve got the answer.

1958, 1958.

Wait a minute, with all the CGI that we have available right now.

That’s the problem.

You go back to 1958?

That’s the, here you go.

One of Steve McQueen’s earliest films, if not his first film, The Blob.

Oh snap, The Blob.

The Blob.

Let me ask you.

Wait, that could be any, that’s any movie.

That’s any movie, Chuck.

That’s snot.

Snot is coming to get us.

Something blew its nose on the earth when it traveled.

So that’s why they were freaking out.

Snot, oh my God, it’s snot.

So The Blob, one of these low budget B movies, I think they were called back then.

In any case, what was intriguing about it is this thing didn’t have a face, didn’t have arms, legs, nose, mouth, shoulders, fingers, toes, head, didn’t have any of the things you normally would be putting on an alien, primarily because you have an actor in the alien costume.

And so why would a creature from another planet with no DNA in common with life on earth look more like us than we do compared to other life forms on earth?

Right here on earth.

Right here on earth.

So my argument is, what are two really different life forms?

Humans and jellyfish and oak trees.

Let’s take those three, okay?

That’s quite the gamut.

That is.

Whatever the alien is, it should look more different from the three of us than we do from one another.

Because it’s coming from a completely other kind of thing.

So, that’s why the blob, for me, which had no spinal column, it has no nothing.

It’s got no nothing.

It’s a blob.

It’s a blob.

It’s a blob.

And another little known fact, I mean, it’s known if you paid attention, the blob was, like you said, was like snot.

It was transparent, colorless when it arrived on Earth.

After it consumed its first victim, for the rest of the movie, it was red.

That is nasty.

It became the color of the blood, right.

That’s wild.

It happened in just one scene, and then you don’t think about it.

I think the blob is just this red thing.

So yeah.

Now, I don’t, because I’m, You couldn’t defend against the blob because it would come in under the door.

It would do it.

It would come in through anything.

Through the grates of the thing.

It came into a movie theater, terrorized people, because that’s how it got in.

It should have called it the ooze.

That should have been the name of it, the ooze.

For me, that’s the most, that representation of an alien has the highest sort of integrity with regard to it not looking like anything here on earth.

Now, that being said, there are two movies, maybe three.

So start with 2001, A Space Odyssey.

That had aliens in it, you just never saw them.

You saw the manifestation of their intelligence.

So Arthur C.

Clarke and Carl Sagan was one of the advisors on that film.

They said, just don’t show aliens at all.

You can’t imagine it, but you can put their handiwork.

And so that’s one that did it.

Not only that, in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, which then became a movie in the late 1990s, because 2001 A Space Odyssey was 1968.

So, Contact, that also had aliens that you never saw.

Well, that’s because, hi, I’m going to take the form of your father.

Oh, yes.

And that’s him.

I’ve taken this pleasing form to you, because there’s no way you could actually comprehend what we really look like.

Right, exactly.

Exactly.

So these are, I think this shows honesty in our ignorance by not even attempting to show them at all.

Okay.

And meanwhile, a very important movie, but for me showed very little imagination was Predator.

Predator is this alien drops on earth and goes human hunting, right?

It’s like it’s what he does, and it’s got Arnold in it, and it’s got some other muscled men of the 80s in it, and they fight this one alien.

Well, how tall is the alien?

He’s about, you know, six feet five.

It’s not three inches tall, and it’s not 60 stories tall.

It’s approximately human sized.

It’s got feet, except they’re a little bigger.

It’s got a head.

It’s got a mouth.

It’s got arms.

It carries weapons.

It’s got a belt.

It’s got stuff.

And this is an alien?

Come on now.

So it really shows an absence of imagination in Hollywood anytime they go down that road.

Now, what do you think of alien?

So that’s…

The Sigourney Weaver.

Sigourney Weaver.

So the actual alien itself, who happens to be my favorite alien because, I mean, you know, because he’s got a mouth and a mouth.

Right.

So if the mouth with teeth is scary, then you give him two mouths with teeth.

Exactly.

It’s got to be twice as scary.

So it opens the mouth, but then there’s another mouth and then another mouth.

Also, too, the fact that it bled acid, to me, that’s just the coolest thing ever.

Okay.

But it still had a mouth with teeth.

Do you realize most life forms on earth doesn’t have teeth?

Don’t have teeth.

In fact, teeth, I think, are only invertebrates.

Let me think about that.

You got to eat something.

You got to chew.

You got to chew.

It’s not only…

Well, worms eat things, but they don’t have teeth.

Well, they absorb.

No, they have a mouth, but, yeah, a lot of things.

Whales that don’t have teeth, that have baleen instead of teeth.

Right, right.

It filters through.

Right, right.

So, I’m just saying this concept that you’re going to make an alien and it has teeth.

Because teeth are scary.

I don’t have a problem with that.

Just don’t try to convince me that this is something from another planet.

Can you imagine if the alien tried to gum you to death?

If a lion came running after you and it roared and had no teeth in its mouth.

Hey, how you doing?

Right, it’s wearing slippers and a robe.

Yeah.

So.

All right.

Well, you know what?

I got to say, you make a very cogent argument for the blob that I never considered.

And you know, I’m going to say, here’s how you’ve changed my perspective on this.

I always thought that the blob was a lack of imagination.

Really?

Oh, yes.

I always thought of it as, oh, OK, so you guys just you couldn’t think of a good monster, so you just made it into a blob.

But the way you explain it, and I’m wondering if they actually were as thoughtful as you, because if so, then it’s brilliant.

They’ll take it.

Yeah, if not, they’re lucky that you came along.

Well, it was preordained because, in fact, that was my birth year.

So we had, the movie and I are the same age.

OK, right on.

OK, cool.

All right.

Here we go.

Let’s go to Ryan Espinoza from Facebook and Ryan a little all over the place, but I’m going to give it to you right now.

He says, if the universe is technically finite, how about the multiverse?

And the reason why I say hello all over the place is, first of all, is there a multiverse because he has made that a fact, which is not necessarily an evidence.

So what are your thoughts, first of all, on a multiverse?

Now, secondly, after your thoughts on the multiverse, if this universe is indeed finite, would that multiverse also be finite?

That’s the question.

Yes.

I altered his question.

You summarized the question.

I summarized.

So, the answer is, we got to take a break and come back in the next segment.

We’ll get the latest on the multiverse on StarTalk Cosmic Queries.

Cosmic Cauldron Edition.

Cauldron.

Cosmic Cauldron Edition.

Bye We’re back to StarTalk CosmQueries, Chuck Nice.

Yes sir.

Fully locked and loaded.

Fully locked and loaded.

We last left off on the multiverse, and who’s the questioner again?

And the questioner was Ryan Espinoza.

He wanted to know if the multiverse was finite, but first of all, we would have to establish, is there a multiverse?

Okay, so first of all, before we get to the multiverse, we don’t know if the universe is infinite or finite.

We just don’t know.

Got you.

And I don’t know if we can know for sure any more than a ship at sea looks in every direction and it sees the horizon and it doesn’t see land in any direction.

It’s in the middle of its own horizon.

Right.

It cannot know how big the actual ocean is if it only has access to the water within its own horizon.

What it would have to do is keep moving and it would have to travel.

And we keep moving and take its horizon with it and that horizon moves across the water surface and then eventually they might see land.

At that point, they have found the edge of the ocean.

The ocean ends because more ocean doesn’t keep coming in.

So if we wanted to explore, if the universe had some edge, then we’re not going to learn it just sitting here in the middle of our own horizon.

We’d have to start moving to other places within the universe.

And you want to do that fast, otherwise it expands faster than you can get there and you’ll just never know ever.

If the universe is expanding faster than you’re traveling, if the ocean is growing faster than the ship is sailing.

Well, yeah, now you’re on an oceanic treadmill.

That’s right, thank you.

That’s a perfect analogy there.

So we simply don’t know.

So any time any of my, I or my colleagues reference the size of the universe or the dimensions, it’s basically the observable universe, the universe that’s within our horizon.

We can give you the size of that and how long we’ve been at that.

Beyond that, we don’t know.

Now, the multiverse, it turns out the multiverse is on good theoretical grounds.

So, we didn’t just pull that one out of some orifice, right?

It’s quantum physics mixed with general relativity, two highly successful understandings of the universe, when you shotgun marry them in the early universe.

Because quantum physics is the physics of the small and general relativity is the physics of the large.

But the early universe, the large was small.

So, if the large was small, then perhaps the quantum influenced the entire universe.

So, when you have particles popping in and out of existence or doing weird things, maybe that particle is an entire universe unto itself, if the universe is the size of a particle.

So, you can take that kind of reasoning that comes from that direction.

And in doing so, you can conclude that maybe our universe is not alone in a multiverse, possibly an infinite number of universes to reckon.

So, by the way, depending on what level multiverse we’re talking about, the universe can just have different configurations of atoms and energy, or even the same configuration.

Now, Chuck, you have a goatee in this universe.

That means you’re the evil Chuck.

There’s another universe where there’s a clean shaven Chuck that’s the good Chuck.

Yeah, I think he’s faking it.

So, that’s one class of multiverse, but there are other classes of multiverse.

I first seen explicated by a friend and colleague, Max Tegmark up at MIT.

He’s written extensively on this.

There are other levels of multiverse, another one where, okay, the matter and energy, not only that can be different, but the initial conditions are different.

So, maybe your universe won’t expand forever.

Maybe it will re-collapse.

Then there’s another level where the laws of physics are different.

This is how deep into the rabbit hole you drop before you hatch out another universe.

What control do you have over the laws of physics?

In the traditional multiverse that people think about, we are in the same space-time, just different pockets that cannot interact with each other, as is different ships at sea would be.

They’re on the same ocean, but they don’t interact with each other because their horizons are separate and distinct.

So that’s the traditional multiverse that people think about and talk about and has been represented in science fiction.

So just because we might be finite or open or flat doesn’t mean others have to be because their matter and energy could be distributed differently.

So there you have it.

That’s fascinating stuff.

By the way, people say, well, if there’s an infinite number of universes, then there’s you and another universe.

Therefore, you can in principle live forever.

But no, that other me, it’s not me.

It ain’t me.

Right.

Just as much as you care about him, he cares about you.

See, that’s the problem.

Instead, we’ve done this experiment before with copies of each other, and it’s called twins.

Twins are identical copies, and they walk among us.

They came from the same single cell.

Same single cell.

If you pinch one twin, the other twin doesn’t say, Ouch.

So they’re not the same person, even if they’re molecularly identical.

So that’s why I’m not thinking that this other person in another universe is going to grant me eternal life.

I don’t see that.

I don’t think it.

I don’t think it’s good evidence or reasoning to argue that way.

Well, thanks, Ryan.

Appreciate the question, man.

Here’s Michael Scarn from Facebook.

And Michael says, The faster you travel, the slower time is for you.

How much younger do career pilots stay, being if they fly and travel faster than common people?

So if you’re constantly spending time at, let’s call it supersonic speed, is there any negligible time difference?

You can always calculate how much younger they are relative to their twin on Earth.

You can always do that.

By the way, we’ve done this experiment.

There was a twin astronaut who went into orbit and stayed there for a year or so and left the other one on Earth.

And we studied, we, I mean, the NASA medical professionals, studied any differences in their DNA, exposure to space radiation.

And there is this factor because in orbit, you’re going much, much faster than a fighter pilot would ever go.

In fact, in orbit, you’re going, if you were to travel through the air, it would be like Mach 30 or 40.

Wow.

And fighter pilots are going Mach 2 at most, Mach 3, right?

So if you’re really, you know, really booking it.

So you can calculate.

You just plug that into an equation.

And when you do that, and I did this for, it’s the twin brothers that went into space.

By the way, this is not a special calculation.

Anybody with rudimentary knowledge of Einstein’s special theory of relativity can calculate this.

What I mean by rudimentary is it’s like the first equations you learn in Relativity 101, whenever you might.

Okay, too bad I didn’t take that in school.

Relatively 101.

I might have come up with like a hundredth of a second or something for being at those high speeds for a year relative to his twin.

So we don’t measure deaths with that time precision.

So for me to say he will live a hundredth of a second longer than his twin on Earth, that’s not a meaningful time difference.

So he’d have to be traveling much, much faster than just mock dozens.

He’d have to be traveling a major fraction of the speed of light and do that for a sustained period of time.

Then you come back days, years, decades younger than your twin would have aged.

That’d be cool.

Yeah, so fighter pilots forget about it.

Yeah, forget about it.

All right, well there you go, Michael.

It’s a hundredth of a second.

I forgot the exact number.

Enjoy that time.

This is…

Let’s keep it simple here, because I like this question.

Since we’re getting into the questions that we don’t normally ever get to, I might as well get to those really weird questions.

This is Ralph Succi, and Ralph from Facebook says, if you were to get a spaced theme tattoo, what would it be?

Now, I don’t have any tattoos.

So, I’m just, you know, I’m the generation where the only two kinds of people ever got tattoos, and it was bikers and sailors, right?

That’s right.

Popeye had a tattoo.

Is there any voice you can’t do?

So, Popeye had like, I think it was an anchor tattoo.

Yeah, on his forearm.

Right.

His bloated forearms.

So, I thought he had some kind of arm disease or something when I was young.

Yeah, probably elephantitis.

I know something, right?

So, I’m just not a tattoo guy, primarily because there’s nothing I have that much confidence in that I want to look at eternally until I die.

I want to always be able to have a thought that’s different from a thought I had before.

And therefore, you don’t lock in a previous thought.

You continue to put in new tap roots.

Now, I said this to someone who had a lot of tattoos.

Oh, no, no, no, no.

My body is just a record of those thoughts.

Well, that’s one way to look at it.

I can write down the record.

That’s another way I can do it.

I have paper for that.

So, if I were to get one, maybe it would be one of these bullet-shaped rockets from the 1950s with the fins.

Oh, yeah.

It’s classically imagined, I should say, even though that’s not how they ended up.

The comic book version of a rocket.

The comic book version of a rocket, but from the day.

No one would draw that today.

Just because it comes from a time when we had very high hopes and expectations that our energy and investments would continue into space and be sustained in ways that we have not lived up.

So that would be a, that’s how I think about it.

All right.

Actually, kind of a cool tattoo.

All right.

I’ll give you that.

I thought you were going to be like, you know, Saturn or something like that.

Oh, no.

No, I could look at pictures of Saturn, which will look better than any tattoo that would ever land on my skin.

This is true.

This is true.

Yeah.

All right.

Let’s go to…

Keeping with the same theme, the stuff we never ask.

Okay.

This is meegoo31 in Instagram.

If you can time travel, what’s the one place you’ll go and the one person you’ll see?

So I assume they mean backwards time travel.

Yeah.

Okay.

So there’s an old joke about that.

All right.

Oh, yeah.

So consider the two facts.

If backward time travel were possible, wouldn’t we have met such a person by now?

Wait.

If backward time travel were possible, wouldn’t we have met such a person by now?

What person?

A backwards time traveler.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

They should have come here to us.

They should have shown up.

But you know, the whole prime directive of time travel is that you’re not allowed to upset the timeline in any way and you’re not allowed to tell anybody you’re a time traveler.

Oh, that’s how they hide among us.

Right.

Oh, forgot about that.

Well, okay, so one of my favorite, was it during the Science March in Washington, shortly after Trump was elected president.

There was a Science March just in praise of science, and one of the placards said, they started to chant, what do we want?

A time machine.

When do we want it?

It doesn’t matter.

Right, I like that.

It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter.

Whenever you get it.

We’ll move back to whatever we want.

Yeah, exactly.

So, if I could move back in time, I would go back and have a conversation with Isaac Newton.

Okay, so now that we know that.

And he lived, I have to go back to late 1600s.

The year 1700 would work.

He had already discovered his laws of optics, gravity, and calculus.

And laws of optics are still getting assembled.

He discovered them, but he hadn’t published it yet.

And I bring some of our problems to him.

But see, no, you know, now let, now, okay, so this is fascinating to me right now, right?

I don’t know how much time we got, but I got to jump into this for a second.

So here you are, you’re back 1700, talking to Isaac Newton.

Now, you know everything that he’s already said.

Yes, isn’t that interesting?

Yes.

But he doesn’t.

Yes.

You also know things that he would find wondrous.

Yes.

How do you have a conversation?

What do you talk about?

When we come back.

Because you might end up screwing everything up.

When we come back, details of my conversation with Isaac Newton that I may or may not have already had.

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We’re back, Star Talk Cosmic Queries.

Of course, Chuck is sitting right there.

Yes, sir.

And you’re here because you named this one, because this is a potpourri, but you’re not happy with potpourri.

No, we went with the Cosmic Cauldron.

Cosmic Cauldron.

I was thinking Cosmic Crucible, but that’s not right.

I like the Crucible.

No, you burn stuff in the Crucible.

That’s very alchemic.

It is.

Yes, exactly.

We have the alchemy, the Cosmic Alchemy.

We’re putting this stuff in the Crucible and burning away the bad and leaving only what we need.

So we left off with the question about who would I meet or what would I witness if I could go back in time?

Definitely, I’m going to meet Isaac Newton.

Okay.

Year 1700 is as good as any in his middle years.

But you posed an interesting point.

Right.

Like there’s stuff that I know, because I’m trained in physics, that he’s already discovered.

That’s right.

And there’s stuff I know that he hasn’t figured out yet.

Right.

And he will figure it out.

Okay.

So now, this is everything.

You could screw it all up.

Just disturb the space-time continuum.

Yes.

It reminds me of one of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons, which has been on TV for so long.

It really does.

Homer Simpson somehow turns a toaster into a time machine.

Oh.

And every time he goes back in time and comes back, there’s something different because he keeps disturbing the continuum.

Oh, he disrupts the flow of time.

Right, okay.

And one time all he did was step on a bug and then he comes back and everybody’s a lizard person.

I gotta find that episode.

It’s very funny.

And then he comes back and everything looks the same except it’s super boring or something like that.

And he’s like, oh, I gotta get out of here.

And he goes and right after he leaves, it starts raining donuts.

So that toaster is actually access to the multiverse.

Yes, exactly.

That’s what it is, yeah.

So here’s an interesting issue.

It’s a time travel issue.

And it has to do with what are called gin particles.

In this particular example, it would be a gin concept.

So a gin particle, it’s J-I-N is how you, it is something that was never created nor destroyed.

It just exists.

Okay, so in the more classic movie classic example, let’s go to Back to the Future, okay?

And Back to the Future, Marty at the school prom gets a hold of the guitar.

And then he starts imitating Chuck Berry.

Chuck Berry.

Okay, but Marion Berry is the band leader, Chuck Berry’s brother.

Marion Berry hears this tune and say, Chuck, here’s the tune you’ve always been trying to figure out what would work.

And he puts the phone up to the thing and he hears-

It’s Johnny, okay.

And so now if we follow that through, what we are led to believe is that Chuck Berry got his most brilliant song from a whiteboard.

Yeah, exactly, from Michael J.

No, but what happens is, so if he does actually get it from Michael J.

Fox, and he then influences Michael J.

Fox in the future, then the song only exists in this loop.

It was never written by anybody.

Right.

Do you see what I’m saying?

No, yeah, that’s the only way it could exist, is that it was never written by anybody.

It was never written, because Marty plays it because he heard it sung by Chuck Berry.

Chuck Berry hears it for the first time through his brothers putting the phone out on the thing, and then Chuck Berry includes it in his performance, as well as the…

The duck walk.

The duck walk, right.

Yeah.

So, in the case with Isaac Newton, it would be interesting if Newton is on some calculation and he’s struggling.

I say, hey, have you thought about, have you considered?

Hey, Isaac, Isaac, just carry the two.

Just carry the two, Isaac.

I forgot to carry the two.

You forgot to carry the two.

And so there I am helping Isaac, and then of course he’s remembered for doing it, but I only know it because I read that he had done it.

And so again, that would be something that’s closed in a time loop, basically, that never had a beginning or an end.

So it’s just an interesting little fact about that.

I love that.

I love that the djinn particle.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In that case, it’s a djinn concept.

So for example, in the movie, the lesser scene movie, but it’s a slow romantic, not a rom-com, but what do you call them?

If it’s just a romantic movie.

A romantic movie, okay.

It’s a romantic movie.

It was called Somewhere in Time.

A love story, Somewhere in Time.

It’s a love story.

It was a love story.

And I think I told this at some other occasion.

Yeah, you told me, I know.

I think where an old woman comes up to the main character who happens to be Christopher Reeve, who played Superman.

Oh no, we never talked about this.

We never talked about this.

And she comes up to him.

He’s a professor and she gives him a locket and says, come to me.

Oh no, we never talked about this.

And he finds out that she’s back in time, like the 1920s or the 1930s.

And he does research on this and finds out that this woman exists at another time.

And he goes to his physics professor and colleague and says, anyway, go back in time.

So we’ll try this and do this.

He goes back in time and he brings this locket with him and he does meet her and they do fall in love.

And as a gift of his love for her, he gives her this locket.

Well, he didn’t love her that much.

That was her locket.

Gave her her own locket.

But whose locket is it?

Right.

Because in that case, that’s a djinn particle where the locket was never created or destroyed.

And it doesn’t exist before it appeared and it doesn’t exist after.

It only exists within that time.

It’s locked in time between when she gave it to him and when he gave it to her.

Yeah, so you have to just watch out for that.

Yeah, so now, what do you ask him?

What do you say to Newton?

I say, please help.

You just ask him everything.

Yeah, the problem is there’s a lot we take for granted, not just I, but any of us living in the 21st century, we just take for granted that we understand energy, which was a poorly formulated concept in his day.

So he wouldn’t even know what you’re talking about.

How’d you get it?

I took a car, what’s a car?

What’s a horse-drawn carriage without the horse?

Well, how did it move?

Through chemical energy.

Well, what’s chemical energy?

Well, he’d be a fast study, but I have to invest a lot of time catching him up on things that we just live with.

I don’t like this, I don’t like this.

Here’s what I say, because he’s your hero, right?

He’s the guy that you love.

He’s got a beautiful mind.

And after you talk to him for an hour, you’re going to be like, listen, dumbass, I told you that already.

Newton, Newton, you dumbass.

Right, yeah, nah, I don’t like this.

I don’t like it.

OK, that could upset my hero, the hero worship.

Right.

So that’s what I would do.

All right, there you go.

Let’s go to Austin C Media from Instagram says, hello, my name is Austin and I live in upstate New York.

I work in the aerospace industry and I build giant hyper rockets.

My question is based on rocket telemetry as the earth rotates to east, as we launch rockets to east and use the earth’s gravity to help it get into orbit.

Does the amount of gravity assist come from just the overall mass of the earth and its speed of rotation, or does the mass of our iron core help with the amount of speed of the rotation in relation to the amount of gravity we feel?

Okay, it’s got nothing to do with any of that.

Okay, there you go.

It’s got nothing to do with any of that.

Austin, we’re going to treat you like Isaac Newton right now.

No, that’s a rocket scientist overthinking the problem.

Right, okay.

It’s possible to think too much.

Just rain that in a little bit.

Right, let that big brain calm down.

Just calm, just take a cleansing breath.

So, clearly he knows, and others might not know, that it is our preference, our, anyone who’s launching rockets to launch east.

Okay, because earth is rotating west to east.

So you get the…

You get a little assist.

You get a little, it’s not a gravity assist.

No, it’s not a gravity, it’s just a little push.

It’s a push, a little speed assist.

A tailwind.

A tailwind.

A little tailwind for the rocket.

So, and as such, if you want the maximum extra boost, you want to do it where earth is actually moving the fastest.

Obviously earth is spinning as one solid object.

But at the equator, it does one full turn, in the same time it does closer to the pole, but it’s got a bigger distance to travel.

It’s therefore moving faster.

You look at the equator, it’s going about a thousand miles an hour.

We’re here in New York City.

We’re moving about 800 miles an hour due east.

So generally you want to launch as far south as possible.

They have some mobile launch platforms that will pick up your rocket, go to the equator and then launch it from the equator.

It’s kind of cool.

It’s a business.

It’s a business model.

So anyhow, if you do that, then you don’t need the fuel necessary to have gapped that extra speed boost that you got.

So it’s a matter of if you save fuel, now I have more payload capacity for the thing you’re paying me to put into orbit.

So everything is better, okay, if you can take less fuel.

And it’s not that much less fuel, but it’s enough you can make incremental differences in your profit margins.

That’s all.

It’s got nothing to do with the core.

It’s got nothing to do with how strong Earth’s gravity is.

That extra speed is just this whiplash.

There’s the rotation itself.

That’s all it is.

And the speed with which you have to attain so that you can maintain orbit, that depends on Earth’s gravity.

And for Earth, it’s about five miles per second.

If you go a little less than five miles per second, you’ll go up and then crash back down.

So you want to go fast enough so that your Eastern motion, you want to go so fast that as you fall back to Earth, Earth curves away from you.

So if every five feet, let’s say, you fall towards Earth, you move so far downstream that Earth’s curved shape has curved five feet away from you.

So you’re constantly falling towards Earth at a speed where Earth is exactly curving away from you.

That is the orbital speed, and for Earth, it’s 18,000 miles an hour.

It comes out to about five miles per second.

Wow, there you go.

That’s so cool.

There you have it.

Nice.

Skate philosophy.

I’ve been in the house with my kids for a long time.

That sounds really good, man.

Sending them or you?

You could make it a game.

Who wants to go on orbit today?

It’s a dealer’s choice as far as I’m concerned.

All right.

We are running out of time, so let’s get to KOB from YouTube.

How can we be running out of time?

I’m talking too much.

Damn.

It’s okay.

Does light ever cease to move?

Can a photon be in a state of momentumless relax?

Or does it continue to move indefinitely?

So I guess he has to be talking about in the vacuum of space because we know that photons cease to move, you know, when they hit your eye.

Right, they’re not photons anymore.

Right, they’re not photons.

They become pockets of energy, electrochemical energy in your head.

So photons, we can slow them down.

Anytime you put them in a transparent, denser medium, they go slower.

So they go slower going from vacuum to air.

It goes slower going from air to water.

It goes slower going from water to glass.

It goes slower going from glass to diamond.

Right.

Diamond light travels 40% of its peak speed in a vacuum.

Okay.

So now there have been some experiments where they created a medium where the light is really, really slow.

Like you could practically watch it move from one point to the other.

Right.

So what you’re doing is they’re boosting what’s called the index of refraction.

The higher the index of refraction, the greater the light will bend as it crosses into that medium, and the slower it will move.

That’s why diamonds are so useful as rings, because you put facets in it and the light goes in, it bends so severely that you can trap light enough so that it comes out a completely different place from where the light went in.

So it gives the diamond the appearance of having a certain radiance.

If it only gave light in the direction you’d sent it in, then it’s because I have the light.

But if light comes here and it goes out there and you see it from that direction, it gives you the impression of something highly radiant.

So diamonds have value for that reason, among others, but as jewelry, they have value for that reason.

So, all I’m saying is, in principle, you can have the index of refraction so high that you can watch the light sort of move, but I don’t know that you can just stop it.

I don’t think so.

So no frozen light?

I don’t think so.

Damn, because that would be so cool.

Frozen light.

I don’t mind the molasses light either.

That’s kind of cool, too.

In fact, there’s a laboratory Caltech that specializes in high-speed photography, and they have some camera that takes like a trillion frames per second, and then they put light through a medium that slowed it down, and then you can take all these frames per second.

You can actually watch the light move through the medium.

That’s amazing.

Right, right.

But I don’t think you can stop it.

In fact, let me say it another way.

I don’t want to be around if you succeed, because…

Oh, that’s funny.

Time for one quick question.

What do you got?

Okay, here you go.

This will be very quick.

Daniel220 from YouTube says, If aliens are real, what technology can we suggest that they have?

In other words, what technology do you think they would have?

For example, like a Dyson Sphere.

Is there anything that we…

First of all, if they can get to us…

Thank you.

That’s the jigs up.

Right.

I mean, if they can get here…

I mean, it’s not like we can’t see what’s around us.

We know how close stuff is, right?

Here’s the thing.

I wield things in my back pocket that would have me burned at the stake 20 years ago for sorcery in our own civilization.

If you had the smartphone in the 1990s…

Oh, wait a minute.

Let me do these 19 other things.

People would look at you, what?

What is that?

That’s just us in our own technology in our own time.

You want an alien who got here from another planet, from another galaxy.

You want to say, do they have a Dyson Sphere?

If all you come up with is stuff we thought of that they might have, that’s not creative enough.

Okay?

Because everything they do is going to be more interesting than anything we can even imagine.

That we can ever think of.

Because we’re doing stuff today that’s more interesting than we even invented.

You look at the movie 2001.

Back then computers were getting more powerful.

Because that was 1968 imagining the year 2001.

So computers were just coming around.

You see computers and they get big and powerful.

So in 2001, they’ll be really big.

Right, they’ll be huge.

They’ll be huge.

And no one is imagining that you’ll be carrying computers with you.

They’re not carrying a computer, but they’re trying to imagine the future.

All I’m saying is we can barely imagine our own future with the technology sitting in front of us, much less predict what kind of technology the aliens are going to have.

But if I had to go there, I’d say, yeah, they got warp drives and they can do what the hell they want.

There you go.

That’s it.

Because that’s what we want.

They have warp drives and we want that.

Yeah.

It’s funny you say that to a joke where I say if you had an iPhone and you went back in time just 300 years, they would have burned you at the stake for witchcraft, unless you were a man, in which case they would have worshiped you as a god.

Or if you go back to slavery times, wait, black folks aren’t supposed to be that smart.

That’s a bad example.

Oh, absolutely.

Are you kidding me?

Oh, damn it.

So anyhow, yeah, we got to go check.

That’s another Cosmic Queries.

These are fun.

Yeah, these are so much fun.

Thank you.

Yeah, definitely.

All right.

This is Cosmic Queries.

StarTalk.

Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Chuck Nice.

We’re all here for you.