Cosmic Queries – World Space Week

From the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and beaming out across all of space and time. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and this is a Cosmic Queries edition where we are celebrating Space Week. That would be the first week of October that happens to contain my birthday, I'm just saying. Woo! Oh yeah. Who's making those whooping noises? I've got my co-host for this, Matt Kirshen. Matt, welcome back. Thank you, Neil. Excellent. What came first, by the way, a Space Week or your birthday? Did it become Space Week because it was the Neil deGrasse Tyson birthday we've got? My birthday precedes the official celebration of Space Week. There we go. So maybe. Maybe that was the designation. Maybe. We got a lot of fun questions coming up. We showed it. And I got backup here. In fact, I'm his backup. If he's on a show with me, I'm his backup. The one, the only, the geek in chief, Charles Liu. I am so happy to be here, Neil, thank you. Friend and colleague, you're a professor at City University of New York at Staten Island. Correct. And so you just had a book come out. Yes, thank you. Yeah, it's called 32nd Universe. It's published by Ivy Press in the UK. Is it because there are 31 other universes and we're in the 32nd one? Is that what that means? I asked the very same question. The parsing is 30 hyphen second space. Every decision that's made, the universe splits in two. He made 31 decisions that nobody wanted, right? Well, it's only, to make 32 decisions, that's only what, is it like five? That's right. No, yes, it is about cosmology and I have two terrific co-authors who are also astronomy and physics professors. And we talk- The co-authors are? Karen Masters at Haverford University or Haverford College and Saville Salour at Rutgers University. Okay, cool. And we talk about cosmology, including the idea in quantum mechanics that you create many worlds with a hypothesis- With every split of a timeline. With every decision you make, you create a new timeline. Which I believe was originally formulated by the father of the lead singer of one of my favorite bands. Oh. I believe it was Hugh Everett, the physicist who came up with that. Hugh does get credit for that. Whose son created the band The Eels. No kidding. Another connection between science and music. You got it, you got it. And Matt, you of course, the host of Probably Science. That's it. And I said I would never invite you back until it became Definitely Science. You're still not there. The one episode that you were kind enough to come on, that was the definite episode. And everything else was just flailing. You hosted me on your show. You were very kind to come by that, yeah. So we've got questions from our fan base, as we usually solicit for Cosmic Queries. And this is just, I guess, general, I haven't seen them, general questions about space. You're going to handpick them, and you're going to throw down the gauntlet, and Charles, I'll sit here and eat my lunch. Well, Charles, that's why I bring them on, so I don't have to work that day. We have very strongly overlapping Venn diagrams in our expertise, but he takes it another dimension beyond that. I'm sweating now, Neil, I don't know. We'll see how it goes. I'm going to start off with this one because this ties into what we were just talking about. This is from DQ Fam who says... What platform? On Twitter. This is DQ at Flatnaught on Twitter. I think that's actually relevant to this question because DQ Fam, aka Flatnaught says, is there a parallel universe where I, as an astrophysicist on the flat earth, combat the disinformation agenda of the round earth society? Oh! Oh! Way to start us off with an easy one. Well, the short answer is no because... Next question. But I think we can take this in a direction where we imagine that it actually is in a flat universe, a two-dimensional universe, where somebody says, no, actually the universe is three-dimensional, right? Now, remember the beautiful book Flatland from... By Eben Abbott, yeah. From decades ago. A century ago, yeah. It's been a century? Yeah, yeah, it was turn of the century book, yeah, uh-huh. Turn of the previous century. Right, fair enough. How can we prove that the universe is two-dimensional if indeed it is two-dimensional, where someone is claiming that there's a third dimension? I would approach it this way. Well, you're talking about the whole universe, the dude's just talking about Earth. Right, so... I guess if the universe is two-dimensions, Earth has to be a flat disk. Correct. Oh, gotcha, gotcha, fine, fine. So in that sense, right, then some non-scientific individual comes along and says the universe is a three-dimensional structure and the Earth is actually a three-dimensional structure. How would you counter that, right? And so that makes it a more interesting question. And I would say one of the first things you would try to do is to see if you can prove that the two-dimensional universe cannot project into the third. In other words, you cannot find a way to extend the universe in an orthogonal direction to both. Perpendicular. Yeah, excuse me. You can't extend something perpendicular to both length and width. Now, can you do that in any... Well, what you're saying is in our current universe, we have a height, width, depth, and you're saying that the version of that question to us would be find another place to stick out a line that's at right angles to those three other right angles, and we don't know how to do that. Right. And so that would be the way... How do you do that? As someone in a true two-dimensional universe, just trying to say that there is no third dimension. Am I right in thinking there are some theories of physics that involve higher spatial dimensions in our universe? Oh, completely. But those dimensions are not visible to us. Okay. And one of the well-known formulations of this is something called a compactified dimension. Charles, you're okay with this? Through these extra dimensions, you just can't see them. You're okay with this? I'm not okay with it yet. Okay. But they haven't been disproven. Okay. Here's the idea of the compactified dimension. If our length was actually, you zoom in further and further and further, and you find out that our length is actually, has length, width and height. But it's so small compared to even atoms or subatomic particles that that width and height is not detectable in our universe. It's tantamount to just being a one-dimensional string. It's as if it were one-dimensional for all intents and purposes. Is that where they use the word compactified? It's contained tightly within the other dimensions. You can imagine, for example, looking at the Alaska pipeline. If you're standing right next to the Alaska pipeline, it is obviously both with length and width. Additionally, it has height. So it's a three-dimensional object. You step a little further away, it just becomes like a long strip. So you think it has height and length, but you can't see the depth anymore. And then if you fly away, say, to Canada, and you're looking at the Alaska pipeline from a distance, it only looks like a line. By that same token, we could compactify dimensions into our linear dimensions. That's how you get the higher dimensions, even though you can't experience them. Right. And somehow, if you think that those compactified dimensions can affect our universe in ways we can't measure, then you can, say, set up a universe with multiple dimensions. And what you're saying is we're too big. We are. Isn't that cool? In a universe for which we are very, very tiny, we are still way too big to see hypothesized compactified dimensions. And we're too small to see that Earth is a sphere. Yes. We're just walking a straight line, and it's a straight line to you, but if you back out, you're walking on the surface of a sphere, and you don't even know it. And so that's how you would try to address two-dimension, three-dimension, more-dimension type things. But I love the questions. Yeah, very clever. I love the question, and I love that answer. So, this is more of a practical question from Simas Star on Instagram. Will we focus more on habitable planets or or rich planets in the future? That's ore. O-R-E. Oh, okay. Or rich planets. Or rich planets. Because I would focus on rich planets if it's just or rich, because then I could, like, you know, do business with them. But ore rich planets, I think, are not as interesting as habitable planets. And the reason is to go to another planet that is trillions of miles away, to get a little bit of ore and then bring it back to Earth is really impractical. You can't hardly imagine a substance currently known to science for which that would be profitable or economically feasible, right? You have, of course, the science fiction world where you imagine something called, oh, I don't know, unobtainium. Sure, yeah. Which could not be obtained here on Earth and therefore you must go far away to get it. But that seems extremely unlikely to me. So I would much rather find the blue skinned creatures than the unobtainium. All right, so I think there will be... I agree with you scientifically. But as like a practical guy, as a realist... I think the drive to obtain resources and possibly unobtainium will be greater than the drive to find other life. And the more busy we are in space, the less will be the need to bring the resources back to Earth compared with bringing the resources to other on-site locations. So that has value. You're thinking much further in the future than I am. Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Because I can certainly see that... And then you don't have any planet. Asteroids might have this. No, that's the thing that I wanted to point out. I'd still claim the first trillionaire, the first trillionaire will be the person who exploits the natural resources of asteroids. Well, there is a connected question here from Saigai Kai on Twitter. What are the most common precious metals and useful elements found in asteroids? Could we mine asteroids to build components for starships in space shipyards? I would say the rare earths are more important for asteroid mining. Yeah, well, I think all of them. Microchips and things like that. Yeah, the rare earths. By the way, the rare earths are not particularly rare. They're just mostly in China. So access to them is not as free and smooth as we might want for the future of our technology. And as Charles noted, the rare earth elements are fundamental to what is our electronic components to making them work and do their thing. So yeah, I think it's the first trillionaire and they're all there on the asteroids. They are there. Yeah, the challenge is to get them back to earth. You gotta get there, fine, but then you have to mine them and you gotta bring them back. And mining is actually pretty complicated. There's a lot of engineering. Build the ship in space, dude. Don't bring it back to earth. It's a waste of a whole journey. Build your, that's what the question is, right? Well, then how do you get the people from earth to the spaceship? You still need another spaceship, don't you? Robots do it. The robots build the spaceship, and then you go up when it's time to go. Why not? Sure. There's an app for that. Your spaceship is ready, sir. You are definitely looking much further along the time horizon than I am. And I think that's a fair statement. I will agree with you if we're talking centuries, not decades. Money drives things more than curiosity, unfortunately. The ideal part is to combine the curiosity with the money, and then it happens like that. Here is a Twitter question from George Xenophontos. This is more of an Earth-based question. Why haven't there been a greater number of advancements on solar energy, given that it's literally a constant free source of energy? Yeah, Charles. I have been on my soapbox on this with my astronomy students ever since I started teaching. Solar energy is so plentiful and it's so free. You make the calculation, in fact. What does so free mean? Okay, that's my point. Free is free. That's my point. It means that I don't need to pay for the energy to arrive to my house. Free. Okay, that's the free. The rest of it is the thing that costs money, right? Think about this. The amount of energy that the sun sends onto the surface of the Earth is what we call a unit of insolation, right? Insolation with an O as opposed to insolation. That's a real word? Yeah, insolation. The Earth scientists use it. That's why we don't know it really. Insolation. Insolation, yes. It's just the amount of sunlight. Yeah. So, sol is Latin for sun. Right. It's the amount of sunlight that hits the Earth, well, any planet. But in this case, the insolation onto Earth is at a rate of 1,400 watts per square meter. Okay. What does that mean? Our typical LED light bulb is now 14 watts. At most. Yeah. Right. So, just on the table in front of us, just on any… Coffee table. Yeah. Coffee table on any surface, you are getting enough light energy, if it were properly converted, to be able to illuminate 100 light bulbs worth of light. Continuously. Continuously. Forever. 100 light bulbs. Most houses don't have 100 light bulbs. So, you can literally light every house in the world on this free energy, if we just figured out a way to exploit it. And I believe, sadly, that the main reason we have not done so is because people find it more profitable to exploit energy sources that are much older in their origins. Our ability... Just say it. Oil. Just say it. All other resources. I don't want to diss older sources of energy, because as much trouble as they have caused us on environmental levels, they have also advanced civilization. They have advanced us so much in so many ways in the past couple of centuries. Oil, coal, natural gas. These fossil fuels have really spurred our human ability to be where we are today. But it is time to switch over. And as with anything in society, switching over from something old to something new takes time. There is resistance. The resistance should move away at this point. There is no more reason for us not to switch, except for trying to preserve the prosperity and the interests of those who have become wealthy from the old technology. I've seen technologies like, I don't know how far along it is, but I know they've trialed things like road surfaces that have solar cells built into them. That's right. You could put solar cells on buildings. You could not just on the roofs, but there are windows now where people can put a film on them. And if you want shade in your room, you just turn the film over and then all that sunlight instead of going into your room gets absorbed by this film, which can then be converted into electricity. As long as we are willing to take a short-term hit on profits, we will have a long-term benefit by using more solar energy. Maybe it won't happen until we figure out how to make it instantly profitable. Who would have thought that after millennia of riding horses, within a dozen, fifteen years, we switched over to cars? At some point, somebody said, this car is more economical than my horse, than feeding my horse and the care and feeding of a huge animal. And so at some point that happened because nobody had to have special programs to get you to buy a car. Everybody bought cars. Is there a tipping point? There you go. I don't see an obvious one, unfortunately. How does it work? Also, the resource, what were you just talking about? Mining for rare metals and elements in the universe. The resources needed currently to make solar cells. Do we have enough of those? I don't know, Charles. The vast majority of what we need is just really good silicon. And so that's sand. We can basically take sand from pretty much anywhere and turn them into solar cells. Silicon dioxide, yes, I know too. It is not hard. It's just at the moment, it costs money. And people would rather not spend that money. I myself am guilty of saying, gee, I should really put solar panels on my roof. And then you just go home and eat a cheeseburger and watch TV. Yes, because it is much less expensive for me as a consumer to heat my home with natural gas right now or to light my home with coal power. First adopters tend to be rich, and they'll do it so they have bragging rights that they're more green than you are. But that helps to change the infrastructure when they have it. The good news is that prices for solar electricity generating things are going down rapidly. I will add before we take a quick break that solar power is also hydroelectric. Because how do you think the water gets up to the lake before it comes through the turbines? The sun evaporates it off the ocean, goes to cloud, the cloud moves over land, it rains. So that's technically solar power, and so is wind energy. It's all from the sun. The unequal heating of the earth's surface creates air currents that drive. So the sun manifested more than just whether you need a solar panel. We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, more of our Cosmic Queries Space Week edition. Bringing space and science down to earth. You are listening to StarTalk. We're back on StarTalk, Cosmic Queries, Space Week edition. Charles Liu, friend and colleague. Thank you. He's my expertise here, and I'm just gonna color comment. If I think he misses something, which he hardly ever does, I'm in there, but generally, I'm not saying a thing. Matt Kirshen, welcome back. Thank you so much. All right, take us there, you got questions. All right, I do. Call from our fan base, I love this fan base. This one is from- They're snarky and they're funny and they're- Smart. Yeah, and smart. Really, really good questions. This one is from Kyle Yocum, who has helpfully given a pronunciation guide and- That's in case we have Chuck Nice, because Chuck can't pronounce anything. Kyle is from Tennessee and asks, how would we identify something as truly being of another universe, rather than just a newly discovered part of our own? Oh, wow. And I think I know the answer to that, and it's antennae. Yeah, just tell the Andorians that. Yeah, they'd be very irritated. No, they're from our universe, too, but, no. I would have to think to chemistry. If an object is made of something that is an element of something we have never seen before, something that wouldn't fit on our periodic table for any reason, that one would have to come from a place where the laws of physics are different, and thus a different universe. I agree entirely. Our periodic table of elements is full. We're incrementing at the top end in our labs, but there are no more slots at all, okay? And if they come up with something that is a base element, then it's gonna be an element configured in some way that our elements are not configured. And we say, yep, this is a weird bird right here. It's similar in the sense that an expanded version of how we know that there is material in our solar system that came from outside our solar system, like before the sun was born. There are grains that contain carbon, nanodiamonds basically. It doesn't have to be before our sun was born. Doesn't have to be. It could just be visiting. Yeah, it could just be visiting, like floating into our solar system. But we know if it's from outside our solar system, if we compare their isotopic ratios or their structures and we see that there's nothing that matches that age or that composition that is actually of our solar system. So we have ways to do this. So that's fine, but then you say, how did it get here? What portal through the space-time continuum connected two different universes with two different laws of physics? That's what the real issue will be. Well, I was going to do a different question, but since you've talked about portals through the space-time continuum, I'm going, you went there, Neil. I went there. You went there. I went there first. Yeah, I'm going to go with Tony in the 845 on Twitter, who asked, even if we somehow discovered the tech to travel at or faster than light, would the passengers of the vehicles survive? Oh. Well, you know how the flash does it, right? Doesn't he have atmospheric separators in front of him? The flash can go up to the speed of light, superhero, fake science, all that, right? But if he's giving someone a piggyback. Yeah, that person is toast. Note to self. Went off for a piggyback ride by the flash. What are we doing? Are we just doing like a donkey ride around the living room or are we going flash speed? Well, yeah, so the issue here is that if we take something up to the speed of light and it can survive going the speed of light, then it has to be able to protect whatever's inside it to be able also to match the speed of light. So, remember that as you get closer and closer to the speed of light and once you reach the speed of light, you cannot have mass anymore. You are energy by definition. So, the way to get up to the limit is to have a really good strong shielding of whatever's there. But then getting past it will require- Interstellar particles, for example. Okay, stuff that could slam into you. Yeah, stuff that hits you. Okay, if something hits you at the speed of light, that would hurt. Yeah, a lot. A lot, unless it's light. Unless it's light, then it just feels good, right? That would be funny. It would. Yeah. That's what the sunscreen is for. That's what it is. It's literally a screen. Yes, that's right. So- For a force field. Yes. You would have to find a way for this vehicle itself to survive and by extension, whatever's inside the vehicle would survive as well. Anything piggybacked though, probably would be burnt to a crisp. But I want to make something clear that speed does not kill. It's acceleration that kills. Right. Okay, so you can be cruising at 99.99% the speed of light. No one will know and no one will care. But if you abruptly come to zero, or if you abruptly speed up to that, then you're a pile of goo at the back of the spaceship. So if you could be magics into the middle of something that was already moving at the speed of light, or at 99% of the speed of light. Right. Well the problem is- Or you can accelerate there slowly. You can do that. In fact, they have spaceships, we, I mean people, engineers, have conceived of spaceships that accelerate at one g, one earth gravity. And then it just feels like you're just sitting here like we're having this conversation. But we're going faster and faster and faster. And do you remember how quickly you get to the speed of light, near the speed of light? Like six months or something. It's not that bad. It's not that bad. Within a year. Within a year. But then it doesn't- Then you have to slow down. It also takes a lot of time. No, you just turn the ship around and slow down in that direction, so you're still- But doesn't your mass then increase as- Your mass increases relative to other things around you. Okay, so within the spaceship, that's also moving at that speed. Right, right. So you and I would maintain our relative masses. But you and I would not retain our relative masses compared to Zorkon, who's out next to the ship. It'd be nice if he weighs like 108 pounds. How much faster do I have to run than Zorkon to look beach-ready? Summer's coming up. While we're talking about summer and atmosphere and such like, Times Natural on Instagram asked, If Mars were to be terraformed, thus given an Earth-like atmosphere, how would it be possible to keep the atmosphere from being blown away by solar winds, considering Mars does not have the magnetic protection that we do? That's a good question! I think the first question, which is even more important, is Mars doesn't have the gravity to hold on to our atmosphere. If we tried to put as much atmosphere on Earth, the tops of it would continuously be going away before we could develop enough pressure on the surface to get to, say, Earth's atmospheric pressure. So the answer is it just has to be constantly being generated. By the way, Charles, there's clearly evidence of it once having had running water on its surface. So there had to be enough air pressure to prevent the water from just evaporating. And that had to have been sustained for some fair amount of time because some of the rivers are meandering. And that's a slow thing. You don't just get that for free. We're talking about millions of years, right? Maybe even up to a billion years. When Mars, like any other planet in our solar system, was forming, the core was slowly aggregating its metals from the surface, right? It's a differentiation process where, just in the same way that pulp and orange juice sinks to the bottom, so too is the metal. Wait, does pulp sink to the bottom? Eventually. My pulp floats. Oh, give it time. Yeah, okay. I got floaty pulp. Wow, I want to drink your orange juice. But no, I know what you're doing. Crushed and freeze orange juice will actually separate. That's right. The separation of the orange juice is an analogy to the separation of, like, a metal core and a rocky mantle and then a rocky crust on the outside, right? We think of rocks as heavy, but they're light compared to metal, so they float. So when the metal sinks, heat is dissipated outward, gently, but with vigor, into the surroundings, the crust and eventually the atmosphere. In that process, you can get a lot of outgassing from underneath the surface out onto the surface, which means that you can, for many millions of years, while that's happening, sustain the atmosphere that will create meandering rivers that you described. So I believe that it will happen. It doesn't take a million years to meander a river. But it may take that much time to, say, evolve a proto-virus. So the answer is the same answer that no, we cannot prevent it from going away, either because of magnetic fields not being there, nor by not enough gravity. Instead, we just have to keep generating more and more atmosphere at the surface so that we can maintain the equilibrium even as the outer layers are going away. Just to be clear, the magnetic field shields us from particles from the sun that would otherwise basically pick off the faster-moving atoms. Would there be other problems as well being on Mars than without that shielding just with the solar winds hitting you? It's not just magnetic field. It's also, isn't it also the ozone? Because UV from the sun will break apart the water molecule and make it H2O, and the H is hydrogen, the lightest element, and it moves very fast in any thermal environment. You lose that, and so leave stranding the oxygen behind. So you systematically, molecule by molecule, take out your water. And that's nothing to do with the magnetic field. Yeah, there's all kinds of problems when you don't have a protection against ionizing radiation of any kind, whether they be light, like gamma rays and x-rays, or whether they be charged particles. Let's just go out and say, if you can terraform Mars, you can put up a shield. Just think about it. Or just a big magnet. One of those little cartoon magnets. With the zaggy lines on it. I would love to have that. Everyone has their own magnet, and they will walk around with an umbrella. Their own magnet? On a miner's helmet, they got their own magnet. The engineers will find a solution to that, Charles. I think the terraforming reality is that you are going to have to live in domes. In a place like Mars. You can't just leave it open. That would be funny if they had a magnet on the helmet. Get too close to your refrigerator, you just get stuck. Mommy! It's like the modern version of getting your tongue stuck on a frozen pipe. Yeah, that would be funny. Which, I think, as a scientist, you know if that happens, the best thing to do is just keep pulling. And eventually it will snap and then roll up. And roll up. It will roll up, yes. That's how it works. We heard it here from two scientists. Well, we've got scientists here as well. One Hive Gazette on Patreon asks, I've heard there are benefits to putting a space telescope on the far side of the Moon. I think because Earth's radio emissions won't cause interference there. Do you think there will eventually be a telescope station there? What exactly would be the benefits? There's a name at the end of that as well. That's Patrick Follis from Mill Creek. Well, Patrick, yes, there should be a telescope there. And there are many benefits. I attended an entire conference on this in Arizona a few years ago. Astronomy from the far side of the Moon. And it was a delight just to see. Because we're nowhere near getting there, but to see these early ideas of why it's useful. Yeah, we are a radio-noisy place. And radio telescopes need this radio silence. It's basically, well, it's noise in the traditional sense. It's electromagnetic noise. Noise signals that you don't want to be there because you're trying to detect something that's dimmer than them. And would it all be blocked out by being on the other side of the Moon? Yeah, it doesn't have to penetrate through the Moon. So there aren't waves that can go around or...? There is some diffraction around the edges. But if you were smack dab on the other side of the Moon, Earth is dead to you. You should be able to avoid it. So, for example, spacecraft now which have landed on the far side of the Moon can communicate with Earth because there is a satellite in orbit around the Moon. So it's further away. Oh, so that's what bounces it off. Exactly. So any civilization back, any colony would have to have some kind of way to bounce off of the side of the Moon to come straight back to us. Either by permanent stations like towers that can talk to each other. By the way… It's like those sort of look-behind glasses that spies have that they get from the back of magazines. What happened to those? Oh, Spider-Man still uses them. Really? According to… Doesn't he use Spidey Sense? He's got to use Google Glasses to see behind him? According to information from decades ago which may have been outpaced by 21st century technology, Spider-Man's mask doesn't actually have eye holes, and he actually sees through mirrors that's off to the side. Really? I didn't know that. I do also like to think that all spies still buy their stuff from the back of joke magazines. Absolutely. That's how I got my invisible ink. That's how I got my Charles Atlas body in seven days. And it is remarkable. And the X-ray specs. You want to see the bones, people's bones. Which would also enable you to see through the moon to earth. You wouldn't have any of that problem. Yeah, so it's a great idea, especially for radio telescopes. But it is, yeah, and radio telescopes especially are big. And that's one of the reasons why you can't just send them out into space far enough away from earth to not be affected by the radio. Oh, because that was going to be my next question is why you can't just sort of put it on a moon lander and then drive it across to the far side. I mean, radio telescopes are big, right? Yeah, radio telescopes are big. They're big because radio waves are big. And to get a lot of radio waves, to focus them, you need a bigger dish than you'd otherwise think you'd need. So, yeah, and since the far side also gets sunlight, it's not the dark side of the moon. So it's not like you're in eternal darkness, which might be an astronomer's dream state. But a day on the moon lasts a month, a month. So all sides get sunlight. 15 days of darkness, 15 days of sunlight. Radio astronomers can actually work in the daytime. Which is one of the coolest things ever. Which is really, really cool, although the sun is a big source of radio noise. So there are a lot of trade-offs back and forth, but it's really cool. There's a zone around the sun you want to keep clear of it because it'll be too noisy for you. It'll be worse than Earth. Where would the best place to be a telescope? On the moon? Yeah, or anywhere. If you could put a telescope anywhere in the universe, where would you put it? And that question comes from Matt Kirshen. I mean, the telescope. Just go to the place you're looking at with the telescope. All right, well, that's a fair point. Just go there with a notepad. If you put a telescope between galaxies, where it's dark and there's nothing, then just go to where you're looking. Don't you sometimes want the sort of wider view? The comfort of just sitting back and being able to repoint? No, I would be more excited about getting a big telescope than putting the telescope in any given location. If we can get a telescope that's the size of the solar system or the size of the Milky Way galaxy. Now, we can put that anywhere that it doesn't get broken. And I'm totally cool with that. Yeah, that's a good point. You can make much bigger structures in space, bigger than Earth itself. And then you got the baddest-ass telescope there ever was. So that would be another use for once you get the technology to start building stuff with robots. Yes, exactly. Well, it's the first thing we build with a robot in space using asteroids, a telescope? I would. Yeah. But there's probably not an economic driver for that. Probably not. This question comes from Moz Amu on Instagram who says, how would you market, that's in quotes, space exploration to someone with an extremely utilitarian view? I'm definitely not the one who needs convincing, but that type of criticism is abundant nowadays. And then also, lots of love from your fans in Dubai. Dubai, very interesting. Cool. Well, the answer to that is, we don't have time. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to find out how to convert the non-believers in space exploration when StarTalk returns. This is StarTalk. We're back on StarTalk. Tyson here, Charles Liu there, Matt Kirshen there, and we are commemorating Space Week. And just to remind people, in case you didn't know, the first week of October happened to have been the week that Sputnik was launched, October 4th, 1957, by the Russians. The Soviet Union, our sworn enemy, the godless communists, and we lost our shit. Okay, over here, it would take us a year, but a year later, in the first week of October, we would found NASA. NASA would become an agency a year later. So those two events, both happening in October, as well as many other space missions that have occurred in October, have made a perfectly good argument to call this Space Week. Yeah, I think it's great. So we are Cosmic Queries, so keep going, Matt. So this is the question from just before the break, is how would you market space exploration to someone with an extremely utilitarian view? Yeah, Charles, what would you do? You're an educator, scientist, space enthusiast, what would you do? Well, I have to use many different strategies with my students. I often teach introductory astronomy classes where most of the students are not going to become scientists. So how do you convince them that it's a good idea to go out into space? I think there's a very good, and you have to use many different strategies. One strategy being in the utilitarian side is to convince people that profit can be made, right? The same way that people came to North America from Europe. The New World. Yeah, back in the 1600s was precisely people convincing others that if you send me to America, I can make money for you and send back stuff for you, whether it's gold, whether it's beaver pelts, whether it's agricultural goods, things like that. I can name places after you. For example, yes. They weren't very creative. They all begin with the word new. New Haven, New York, everything is new. New England. It's just the whole place. So profit is a utilitarian thing you can do, right? Another thing is to appeal to their sense of grandeur, grandiosity, vanity, if you will, depending, ego, yeah. And say, if you go out there, you could be the person that everyone will remember for all of human history, right? A lot of times people will ask me that. And younger kids, for example, will ask me some scientific question, which we don't know the answer to. And there are many of those, right? I will say something along the lines of, you know what? Nobody knows yet. Maybe someday you will be the person that discovers that. And then we will all remember you and your scientific discovery, right? I have a better answer. Here's what you do. You go to that person who's the non, okay, go to that person, and in the dark of night, sneak into their place. Oh yeah, that's real socially acceptable. You do this with a search warrant. Then you remove everything in their home that was inspired or developed because of space technologies. So first you take away the smartphone. Then you take away all integrated circuits and all of this. Take away their Uber account. Take away their health. Their Lasik surgery. Their non-stick pens. All of this. The pens that write upside down. And then you take away, and then they wake up. And they say, what the hell happened? And they take away weather. What's the weather channel? They take away all the weather forecasting. Take away it all. And then just leave them there bare-assed. So then they'll learn quickly what role space has played in our lives. You really can say that space technology, basic science, those kinds of things that do not change the price of bread today can and have changed the course of civilization tomorrow. And we wanna be part of that. Don't add words to that. Just the way it came out of your mouth. Printed on a T-shirt. You gotta know when to stop the beautiful quote. It won't change the price of bread today, but it could change the course of civilization tomorrow. Yes! All right, Matt, next question. Well, I'm gonna combine these two questions because they are- Is that allowed? Is that allowed? Judges? We wanna hear who said them. I absolutely will. I'll credit both of these people, but it's a continuation of what we were talking about. But Jared Decker asks, in the future, will it be government, a private sector, or a combination of the both that will continue humanity's journey through space? Okay. And then, Paul Pundir on Twitter asks, as Neil Tyson, at Neil Tyson stated in his book, military and science flourish together. There are chances that the next scientific breakthrough happened but is classified by the government. Thoughts. Oh, well, that's already happened. It's very true that we get- Oh, I'm sorry, you're right, you're right, sorry. Okay. No, it could never happen. No, no, no, it would never happen. No, Neil has written very eloquently about this particular topic and so I'm going to defer to you in your conversation about the military aspect of things but I will say from my purely civilian point of view, to me, the reason the military and the government and industry all work together to move us forward in technology development and innovation is simply because you need a lot of resources in any society to do those kinds of things. Innovation is almost never just one guy in his basement. That's just not how we're going to move civilization forward. But that's how you get a movie made after you. If you're the one person burning the midnight oil. That's right, he's done it. If it's 10 people taking five years in a lab funded by five different sources, nobody makes a movie about it. I think that's right. And our reality is, again, as Neil has written, is that many, many, many hands are necessary. And much, much, much money is needed to make those really fundamental explorations. What do you think, Neil? Do you know, Christian Huygens? Yes. He's a Dutch polymath, really. At the end of the 17th century. He's credited with the rings of Saturn, identifying them. For understanding the rings of Saturn. Understanding that they are rings. He did a wave theory of light. Yes, yes, yes. And he actually has a spacecraft, the Huygens probe named after him, the one that landed on Saturn's moon, Titan. Detached from. Yeah, beautiful. From Cassini. Show those amazing pictures that showed that on Titan, there are mountains and rivers and lakes, just like we see on Earth, but they're made of very different substances. They're made of methane. So, Huygens and one of his books hypothesizes that God put evil people on Earth so that good people would have to innovate and wage war against them by inventing new tools and technology, and this is the source of civilization because we have bad people on Earth. And this was part of God's plan. This is how connected and convinced he is that innovation and war go hand in hand. If you're just using military resources and then turning them to purely discovery purposes, such as, then that's a different dynamic than what you're describing in terms of the actual desire to wage war. That's an excellent point. Oh, so, and to the answer, I think like Charles said, it'll be a combination. Government will do some things first because there's not a profit motive yet until the trade winds are mapped and the hostels and the friendlies are established. Then private enterprise can come in. I say this often, that the first Europeans to the new world were not the Dutch East India Trading Company. It was governments who took that first investment for hegemonistic regions and economic reasons. And then, I mean, well, long-term economic reasons. Then once you know and it's mapped, this is how much it cost, this is how long it took, this is what you can bring back. Now I can make a business model, I can sell tickets, and now we have the Dutch East India Trading Company. Right, right, that's a good point. We gotta go into lightning round. Uh-oh, all right. Lightning round, reminder. Lightning round is Samba dancers. Okay. All right, we'll see how good you've come. You've come a long way, Charles. Oh, I don't know. I don't know. Let's see, Matt, go. All right, Corey Moon on Twitter. No relation to our moon says, has a nuclear bomb ever been tested in space? If so, what happens? Not to my knowledge, but if it does happen, then the radiation just goes a long, long way. Half of why one would use a nuclear weapon is for the blast wave that does most of the immediate damage. Well, there's three ways atomic weapons work. One is the blast of light energy that will vaporize things on the spot. The next is the blast wave that any typical bomb would have. The third is the radiation sickness that would then kill living things. In space, if there is no air, then the blast wave does not exist. And half of why you would ever use the bomb is nullified. So. But you do get the radiation. You do get the radiation. And you get the light energy on top of that. Which is also electromagnetic radiation. I don't know if we've ever exploded a bomb in space. Thomas Kastner on Twitter says, Star Trek included many aliens and creatures that naturally existed in space outside of planetary atmospheres. Is that possible? Anything is possible. Can it be done with the DNA structure that we're used to? Probably not. I agree. And think about it. Imagine you drive your energy and your systems from inside yourself from stores. Storage that you've established. So you can go outside of your spaceship and you don't have to breathe the air because you have some source of air or whatever is your need for staying alive inside you, but that only lasts a certain amount of time. Is that any different from an egg laid by a chicken? The egg cannot survive in our atmosphere and it stays in there until all the egg resources turn into a chicken that can. So an egg is like a spacesuit for an embryo, an egg shell. I'm with you on it. Let me just give one more 10 second quick answer to this question. An astrobiologist once challenged me to tell her why a star is not alive. And if I was unable to do that, which I wasn't, then maybe all the stars out in the universe are a form of life, not DNA, but just as alive as we are. Yeah, stars can reproduce themselves. They are born, live out their lives, and die. And they have a metabolism. It satisfies almost every definition of life a biologist would hold for us. But do they have agency? And when does a star become alive? Next, go. All right, Christopher Johnson. I think we have one more, go. All right, Christopher Johnson on Instagram asks, there are soon to be an explosion of CubeSats around Earth. Oh, no. How do you see our near future shaping out with space becoming more accessible commercially and to the public? Oh, no. This is not a lightning round answer, but the bottom line is that it's very exciting to have all these satellites up there, but it's also very dangerous, both for science and for human beings over time. We have to be very wise about how we send those things up there. It has to be very carefully controlled, otherwise we're going to really regret having all those things up there. Can you even keep track of where they are? You can, but again, it requires a lot of advanced planning. You can't just say, have a company go, send it up, a thousand satellites, woohoo! That's going to cause us all problems. Yeah, I would say the reason why we haven't been visited by aliens is because they see all this crap orbiting Earth. I'm not coming near that place. That's my sound bite. So, Charles, thanks for coming on StarTalk. It was my pleasure. Thank you, man. I really, really like coming on. You're a regular and we got a little, the flash in there. And Spider-Man. Always a little superhero action when I'm around. Gotta do some super. Love that stuff. And Matt, always great to have you. It's always a pleasure to be here as well. With Probably Science. Thanks for staying. You just came over on A Red Eye. So, thanks for doing the show. Thank you. I'm propped up by coffee right now. The museum's finest coffee. All right. Excellent. This has been StarTalk. Some of you might have seen it. Most will have listened to this episode of Cosmic Queries celebrating Space Week. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and we've done the show from my office at the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.