Extended Classic: Cosmic Queries: Superheroes

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Now. Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where I also serve as the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium. And here we are entering the Cosmic Queries portion of StarTalk Radio. The Cosmic Queries section, I don't do that alone. We get questions that come from every conduit through the internet, from Facebook, from tweets, from our website. And I troll the streets and found Colin Jost walking among them. That's right. Colin, welcome. You know, the last time I had you on, I called you Colin. Yeah, I know. I remember. I'm sorry. I like how little faith you have in my mom. She would name me after the least appealing part of a body. And you were so polite to not correct me on it. So certainly Colin Jost, and you're a lifetime guy in the world of comedy, right? Yeah, I've been doing it. Yeah, I've been in SNL and been doing stand up too. But you're not that old. So you have quite a resume in these years. No, maybe time traveler. I don't know. You know, I'm old enough to like to remember the first episodes of Saturday Night Live, back before it was called Saturday Night Live. This is like 40s? Exactly. In fact, it was just called Saturday Night, which is why they begin live from New York. It's Saturday Night. And it predates that day of the week, right? There wasn't even that day of the week. We had to name this whole day Saturday. Because the show needs a place to air. Right. There you go. So thanks for joining me for this StarTalk Cosmic Queries. It's a delight to be here. So now I don't claim any personal expertise on superheroes, but I do know physics and astrophysics. So let's see what we can offer. Yeah. The spate of questions that have just arisen. So what do you got for me? Right off the bat, here's one from Google Plus from Nathaniel Dorn. I'm a big X-Men guy, so I'm very curious about this. If you were Magneto, what would be the coolest thing you would do with your power over magnetism? This is really more of a wish fulfillment question for you rather than a science question. Oh, wow. Magnetism, power of magnets. You know what I would do? I would clone myself and put one of each of me on the interplanetary voyages of the astronauts and create a magnetic field around the spaceship to shield it from harmful solar particles. Now, but see, that presupposes you can also clone yourself. I feel like that's a whole other step first. Oh, so the magnetic control over magnetic fields, that's the easy one to accept, but not the cloning. I can't give you every power. Even magic has its limits. So the big challenge today is when you leave the magnetic blanket of the Earth, the Earth has its magnetosphere, which extends not quite to the Moon. So if you're in Earth orbit, you're protected from it. Sorry, you're within the protective blanket of Earth's magnetic field and charged particles from the Sun, which would otherwise harm your DNA, get channeled to the poles away from you and it collides with molecules in Earth's atmosphere and it renders the atmosphere aglow, becoming the aurora borealis, the Northern Lights and the aurora australis, the Southern Lights. I didn't know it was called the aurora australis. Yeah, the borealis and the australis. I would have thought it would have been like Antarticus or something. Oh, okay, there'd be aurora articus. Articus. No, that was a guy from Rome. I am aurora articus. You are my subjects. So someone brought up too that Magneto as a controller of all things magnetic could theoretically just tear the universe apart. Is that accurate? No. Next question. The universe is not magnetic. I'm sorry. Well, what's the most damage, like, you know, long term, wide reaching damage they could do? OK, the way they've written his character in the comic books is that he's controlling metal because metal is the obvious magnetic. Of course. But if I remember my chemistry, if you super cool certain gases down into a liquefied state, you can have liquefied magnetic materials. So he could combine with Iceman. Oh, that would be cool. I mean, that would be a good. Yeah. But not only that. That might be a good plot line. Plasma, plasma, which is what the sun is made of, which is essentially the contents of flame. But the sun makes a better example for what I'm about to describe. A plasma is a gas that's so hot that the electrons in the outer layers of the atoms have escaped and they're running the roaming free in the gas. And that means that the gas can respond to magnetic fields. So the sun has a very powerful magnetic field and it's plasma. And so here's this gas trying to rotate with the sun and the magnetic field gets trapped in the rotating gas and gets wound up on itself. And it busts through the sun's surface every now and then. In fact, it's on a cycle of 11 years. And you get solar storms and sunspots and solar flares and prominences. All of this is magnetic activity. So a magneto would not be limited to metal. Magneto could totally tear a new one in a star because he can interact with the magnetic fields that control where those gases appear and what they do. I think you just wrote the Latinx 12 issues of magneto for them. OK, here's the next question from Twitter from Jimmy B at HeyJimmyB. Could Superman survive the spaghettification of a black hole and the force required to escape it? Obviously, he's known to be traveling faster than the speed of light. Yeah, so OK. Well, Superman, in Superman 1, what's the one where he went back in time to save Lois Lane? Oh, yeah, he traveled. It is 1, right? Yeah, Superman 1. In order to fly around the earth that fast, he's going faster than light. So that establishes that. So it's real. So it's real. That makes it legit. So, yeah, actually, if you can actually travel faster than light, you can just climb out of a black hole. Nothing will stop you. However, the journey down to the singularity would, as sure as night follows day, would spaghettify him. He would be ripped apart head to toe. Yes, he's made of denser matter and can stop bullets. And he's yes. But if his material is of this universe, he is not resistant to the power of gravity on that scale. And you'd have a totally spaghettified Superman. And just to go over what spaghettification is. Oh, we only have 20 seconds left in this. Sorry. So he needs a wolf. He needs to pair with Wolverine, who has a healing power. So if he got out of it, he could reunite his particles. We'll find out when we come back in the next segment on StarTalk Radio, the Cosmic Query section. We'll see you in a moment. This is StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and we are in the Cosmic Queries section. Helping me is Colin Jost. Colin, welcome to StarTalk Radio. Thank you very much. We left off the last segment. Talking about spaghettification. Spaghettifying Superman. Yeah, which is a real, that sounds like a classic Italian dish. What is spaghettification? It's when you're being sucked in, the particles are being ripped apart. Yeah, so what happens is as you get closer to the center of a black hole, the field of gravity at your feet becomes insanely higher than the field of gravity at your head. This is a feet first dive into the black hole. And the consequence of this is that your feet will accelerate towards the black hole faster than your head will. And initially that, you know, you're just stretching and maybe might even feel good, but there's a point where that stretching force, it's officially the tidal force, the same force that makes the tides on earth is what rips you apart as you fall into a black hole. That tidal force eventually exceeds the binding force of the molecules of your flesh. At the point. Which sounds bad. Because it is bad. And when that happens, you snap into two pieces on your way down. And this difference in force continues. Your upper half and your lower half each feel this difference in force. And they then rip into a pair of pieces each. Now you're four segments and then eight and then 16. 32 and you run the series down. There'll be a point where you will be a stream of atoms descending impossibly towards the center of this abyss. If Superman is made of materials of this universe, whether or not he is of this earth, if it is of this universe, he is subjected to those same laws of physics and he will be spaghettified just as day follows night. But then what if he were basically took on the powers of a worm who's able to, you know, you could segment them and they would still live different pieces, would then there be a bunch of Superman out there? Here's the problem. When you cut up a worm, each segment of the worm still has a full genetic code for what the whole worm was. When you spaghettify, you are just atoms. Oh, okay, so it's not even. Yeah, the hydrogen atom that got yanked off of your DNA molecule does not remember the DNA molecule from which it came. Yeah, you're a host. And then so what about Mr. Fantastic, the rubber guy? Oh, the rubber dude. Because then how would he go in a black guy? Oh, in a Fantastic Four, ooh. Or who's the woman in The Incredibles? Oh, yeah, right. Was it Elastic Woman? Elastic Girl, Rubber Girl. Elastic, so Elastic Girl, yeah, anybody who's stretchable in principle might be immune to this. But they have to then travel faster than the speed of light. Well, to get out. If they want to get out, you gotta travel faster than lights. We've established that Superman can do that. So we would send Superman into a black hole until he was ready to snap into two pieces. Then he flies his way back out again. Gotcha. And that'd be cool. Or Superman has a baby with this elastic girl, right? Ooh. Which we all been fantasizing. Wow. Have you been fantasizing about being with Elastic Girl or fantasizing with Superman with Elastic Girl? I just wanna watch. I just wanna watch Superman. And I don't even know how old Elastic Girl is. Maybe that's inappropriate for me to say. So this seems, this is the next question. This is from Jeffrey Williams on Facebook. And it says, the character of Captain America seems to be the closest to reality. I don't know what that means, but I guess of the Avengers, say. No, Batman is, Batman. Yes. Batman's a regular guy. He's regular, but of a someone that has superhuman powers. Do you believe there are currently experiments happening that are trying to increase the capacities of the human genome, example, super strength, increased visual acuity, heightened stamina, et cetera, and he also wants to know if these experiments are going on, are they morally correct? I'm not authorized to comment on that. Next question. No, so I can say a couple of things. First, you can't just take a guy that has normal looking muscles and make them 10 times stronger. If the muscles are, if it's made of muscle tissue, because the physics of strength correlates with the cross sectional area of your muscle. So in other words, the reason why when you work out, your muscles get bigger is because they're getting stronger. It's a direct correspondence between the strength of your muscle and how big it is. There's some variation in there like in, are you in good shape, so you can be slender and still be stronger than someone else who's slender but who's not in shape. Because aren't there varying muscle densities that people have too? Sure, but not so, we're all human at the end of the day. Okay, we're all human. And so muscle size correlates with muscle strength. So you can't have a Captain America who had a good body, you know, he'd turn heads in a fitness center. But the strength of those muscles are not such that he would have the strength exhibited by any genetic manipulation at all. It's just not, no, unless... So you couldn't genetically alter the, say, density or efficiency of muscles. Not have it still be biological matter. You'd have to, in fact, just replace the muscle with some other material. Make it more cyborg-y? Yeah, just cyborg them out. And then, oh yeah, then you're good to go. So to rely on our feeble biology to improve in strength I think is not the right way to go if you want to make a better human. Not only that, and try to improve your sight, there's a limit to how dim you can see because of how, because of the size of the iris in your eyeball. Like we were talking about the size of the... Back in the telescope show, I had you in the studio for the telescope show, bigger telescopes see dimmer things. It's that simple. And so people said, oh, can cats see in the dark? How big is their eyeball? All right. If it's not bigger than your eyeball, and we all have retina in the back as detectors, no, they're not, you know, they might do a little better. But they're not going to do much better than you. All right. So unless they had huge eyeballs. There are no owls. Right. Exactly. And this, another question here from Sean Carp on Facebook is, would it be possible to do an embedded metal skeleton with optional deployable weapons, a la Wolverine? Could you do that? Now, here's the problem. So if we replace your bones, which are already pretty strong, with some kind of metal. Adamantium, for instance. Adamantium. Adamantium, yeah. I forgot about it. So if you replace that with some kind of super alloy metal, you're still susceptible to tissue damage. What you're describing is the Terminator. Right. That's the Terminator. Right. You could still stab him and he'd still bleed. So you still suffer tissue damage, but you're not knocking him down. Right. Because he's got that super alloy metal for bones. Sure, I don't see why you couldn't work that. Yeah, but then you still could, you know, if you don't have a healing factor, the healing power, then you're... You'll just be this bloody mess at the end of the day. You'll be alive and bloody. Like when he was repairing himself in the hotel room in Terminator. Exactly. The guy knocks on the door and he looks for a response. Except a little more colorfully. So he's got flies and stuff. Yeah. Cause he's got biological tissue. Keep in mind that for the human body to work, you'd have to graft the tissue onto the metal. Our muscles connect to tendons that connect to ligaments that attach to your bones. So it works biologically. In order to get foreign material in there, you're going to have to attach it all some other kind of way. Now, what about... I've read articles too about the rise of nanotechnology where theoretically one day we'll have tiny robots in our bloodstream that will just sort of rebuild cells. Do you ever think that's... That'd be cool. Yeah. I mean, a nanobot would be smaller than what a cell would identify as being a hostile invader. So it would just be able to do anything it needs to do. I don't see why we can't manage that. But I'd rather do it from the outside. Why get all a fantastic voyage on us and just have some kind of device that beams through your skin and lands at the tumor and cures the tumor? I mean, why? All right, I'll do that. But I'm a bot fan from way back. So you won't stop me. I won't. Well, by the way, Thor, to lift the nuclear matter that is his hammer, but he's an alien, so aliens... That's a whole other thing. It's a different... Do you have... Can I ask, do you have a favorite superhero or one that you're most impressed by their construction or what the physics of them are? I like Batman because he's a reg... I can be Batman. He's a regular. I can be Batman. Right. And who doesn't like the gadgets, all right? And who doesn't like the car? So he's got the best car of any of them, I guess because they can fly, they don't need a car. But you got to like the car. Yeah. Right? As phallic as it is, nonetheless, he's got cool things that the car can do. And so the car is an extension of his utility belt in terms of its coolness factor. So for me, I'd have to be Batman. But as a kid, I don't know if I told you this directly, I wanted to be Mighty Mouse. Really? In a way, just... Because I wanted to save women who were mean people who were trying to harm them. And I wanted to sing opera while I was doing it. Here I come, to save the day. Yeah. No, I just... I somehow resonated with that character. I don't know why. That is a great combination, I now would have thought, is saving women and singing opera. Yeah, and he could fly, and other things were bigger than him, but he had strength beyond what you would expect. So I just felt good about... You wrestled, right? You were a wrestler? I used to wrestle, but we'll get back to that in a minute. So we're in the Cosmic Queries part of StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, join us again for our next segment coming right up. We're in the Cosmic Queries part of StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your resident astrophysicist, here with Colin Jost, a resonant comic. Colin, welcome. Yes, thank you for having me. These are Cosmic Queries on our superhero show. Yeah, this is kind of an exciting... Yeah, I thought so. And you, just before the break, one of the questions was, what superhero would I, do I most resonate with? And I said, I think Batman, just cause he's real. And his toys are fantasy-like, but they're in reach, curiously, right? They're justifiable with technology. Justifiable extrapolations of what we know today. And I confess that in childhood, I totally was digging Mighty Mouse. Yeah. And I was asking, is that part of what got you into wrestling? Was it Mighty Mouse? Oh, I did wrestle in high school, college, and a little bit of graduate school. No, cause when I'm wrestling, I'm not thinking I'm doing it to win the heart of a woman. I'm just doing it just to do it. I mean, it's a very personal thing, actually, cause if you lose, you just got beat. Nobody to blame. There's no team. No team, and there's not some apparatus. It's you, your muscles, your quickness, your smarts, and that's it. So for me, it was the purest form of athletic contest. So yeah, so what are the questions you got? Well, I gotta ask you, what superhero do you resonate with? I mean, Wolverine for me is my favorite of all time. I just, just his style, his attitude. He's so attitudinal. It's great. It's pretty awesome to get shot in the head and then just like kind of shake it off and see the bullet come out of your head and just drink a beer and, you know, be unshaven. And I'm approximating the look as much as I can with his hair and not be shaving. Is he the only superhero that drinks beer and goes unshaven? I'm wondering. I'm sure there are others in binges, but he seems like the most regular. He's, yeah, he's, it's a reliable form of his character. Yeah. And I would feel more comfortable riding a motorcycle if I had a healing power and Adamantium skeleton, you know, then my mom might allow. Rather than be the organ donor that the rest of them are. So this, this next question from Facebook from Eric Shaw is, if Superman needs the sun's rays for his strength, how does he still have powers at night? Well, first, I didn't know he needed the sun's rays. Oh, because he comes nearer to the yellow star. Exactly. Of course, the sun is actually white, but that's a separate conversation. In fact, for another show. The sun is yellow when it's on the horizon, when it's dim enough for you to notice and look at it without protection. So sunsets are these beautiful yellow, orange colors. In the middle of the day, when the sun is not crawling its way through the muck and mire of the super thick horizon depth atmosphere, the sun is not yellow, it's white. That's the color of the sun, period. If the sun were actually yellow, then white things would look yellow, by the way. If you put yellow light on a white sheet of paper, the white sheet of paper is yellow. So if the sun were yellow, then snow would look yellow. But that's only near fire hydrants last night chat. So I don't see why he just doesn't have storage batteries to store up the energy from his daytime in the sun. Maybe. Why not? Maybe. Maybe he doesn't have powers, but at least the electric car he has, he can still putter around in. Wait, Superman? Yeah, maybe he's got a solar power car. A little solar power car that he gets, you don't see him at night, he just goes. That's where he recharges. His Batmobile. So it means the way Superman, if you send him to the Arctic, where there's six months of darkness, he'd be pretty ineffective. That's the thing, yeah. And isn't that his cave that he goes to? Isn't that sort of, it looks pretty icy. Whoa. Seems like the worst place for it, right? The North Pole for six months of the year has no sunlight. Seems like why go there, of all places? It should be an equator cave that he goes to. It should be an equator cave, yes. So if it's only his proximity to the sun, whether or not he's receiving sunlight, then he's still an earth distance from the sun. So he's still getting, he's still getting some. Getting whatever is the magic rays from the sun, whether or not it's the light. Okay, so he's gonna be okay. You think he'll be okay? We don't have to worry about him. So this is a question from Stephen King on Facebook, I assume, I hope, God, I hope it's the real Stephen King. Stephen King. Is what is the likelihood of creating a real world arc reactor like an Iron Man, the kind of artificial arc reactor heart that he has? What if any negative effects would be present if you were to house something like that within the human chest cavity? Yeah, so I like that question. So that's a huge, oh, by the way, so I resonate more with Batman than with Iron Man because the energy source for Iron Man is too remote for me to embrace that. But if you, energy, depends on how you store it. If it's stored thermally, it would be very, very hot. If you store it electromechanically, you'd have a lot of what are effectively wound up springs. All right, there are many ways you can store energy. You can store it chemically. That's what you have in the form of gunpowder. It's sitting there ready to explode, but it's not. So it's energy built in chemically. You can think of mechanically, you can think of thermally. And so if it was thermally, it would eventually heat him up. You wouldn't be able to insulate it perfectly. And so that would be bad for him. That'd be bad. Is there a chemical way that you'd have in the way of a gunpowder where you would have a store of it and it would have small gradual reactions and parts of it? The best way to do that is to have a repository of antimatter, keep it separate from the matter with some kind of magnetic bottle. You can't put it in a regular bottle. I'm just writing this down so I know how to do it later. You're going back to your lab. Where's the antimatter? And then you'd leak out little bits of it to merge with the matter and then you'd have energy at your disposal and there'd be no bad side effects. More on antimatter when we come back to the Cosmic Queries part of StarTalk Radio, the subject of superheroes, in a moment. This is StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist. Based in New York City, where we do most of our broadcasts, and I'm here in studio with Colin Jost, comedian extraordinaire. That's the grandiose way of saying it. Is that on your resume? Comedian extraordinaire. Yes, that's very, it's, yeah. And verifiable, too. Yeah, I was, before that, I was a journalist extraordinaire, and before that, I was a lifeguard extraordinaire. And what did you major in in college? I majored in the history and literature of Russia and Britain. So I read some, lived in Russia for a little bit. Very erudite. Eh, not that. I read some books. And there's a lot of comedic repository in British. Yeah, Russia and Britain are two different ways to go about humor. Yeah, but one a lot darker than the other. And one of our favorite friends of StarTalk is Eugene Merman. Oh, of course, yeah. Who has total 100% Russian roots. That's right, I gotta talk to him in Russian sometimes. I don't know if he's still fluent. Well, we can probably both have two lines and then end the conversation. We're having questions about superheroes right now. Here's one. This is from Christian Demaria on Facebook. And the question is, would it be possible for a sufficiently advanced race to develop controlled wormholes as a means of transportation similar to the rainbow bridge that Thor uses? Yes, entirely. We don't wield enough power over energy in the universe to just create wormholes on a whim. If we did, and the kind of power that would require, if we harnessed all the energy produced in all the stars, all the several hundred billion stars of the Milky Way galaxy, that'd be enough to kind of do what we want to accomplish. Which is to what? To pierce through? What you do is you use that much energy because energy and mass are the same thing. So if you wield that much energy, you can compress energy to smaller volumes than you can solid matter. But they both will have the same effect on the fabric of space-time because mass and energy are the same in relativity and in this universe. They're the same in terms of their effect on the universe and on the gravitational fields of the universe. So you'd wield this, you'd pull it out of your pocket. You say, open me a wormhole right here. And there it opens and you dial up coordinates in time and in place. And you go through the wormhole, come out the other side, you can be anywhere in principle in the universe instantly. One of my favorite scenes in the movie, what's the one where the monsters ink? Undiscussed in the reviews of this movie is that that movie tapped the fourth dimension. That movie was all about wormholes. Those doors were the wormholes. They would go through the door in the factory and end up in a kid's closet. No one, no one talked about this. Just by the way, here's a little extra physics. A little extra physics there. This was an awesome feature of Monsters, Inc. Cause you know they didn't come in your front door to get in your closet. There must have been some other way. It's a wormhole connecting the factory to everybody's closet. Awesome. Yeah, that's so possible. You don't even need to be a god like Thor to potentially down the line. No, Thor wasn't a god. Thor was a regular guy in his own place. They just called him a god in Norse legend because he had powers above anybody here on earth. Right, but then in some legends, he's a god. Right, I mean, in some things. No, he's a god on earth, but in his hometown, he's just Thor. Oh, in Asgard, yeah. He's just a dude. He's just a blonde hair in a tan, right? That's all he is. So he's just another guy, right? Yeah. That's the crazy thing about Avengers is that the people are operating on all different levels. There's a guy that people will think is a god. There's a guy made of an Iron Man. Captain America is just kinda like stronger. Right, right. Hawkeye guy can shoot kinda well. That's just crazy. Scarlett Johansson can kick. Yeah, it's an excellent mixture. Yeah. This question is, could Superman use a large telescope to view Krypton from afar, seeing his long lost family and race before the planet was destroyed, assuming Krypton is further away in light years than Superman is old in human years? Awesome question. Right, I love they did that. And could he then fly to Krypton and armed with his knowledge of Krypton's past, reverse time like in Superman, the movie, number one, and therefore prevent Krypton's destruction? No, but then he would have never come to Earth to then observe the destruction, to go back and prevent the destruction. So it would require some sort of being here, but then a time travel element. No, I'm just saying, if he came here, saw Krypton being destroyed, but didn't want it to be destroyed and went back in time to prevent it from being destroyed, he would have never been cast adrift to have landed here on Earth. But then if he goes back and reverses it, would it stop, but then he would have no remembrance of what happened? Then he would have never come here on Earth to have stopped the explosion. So it's just, it eats itself? It's like you can't do it. Let's pick that up after the break. There's steam coming out of your ear. StarTalk Radio, back in a moment. We are back in the Cosmic Queries part of StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist, and it's my job each week to bring the universe down to earth for you. And helping me accomplish this are people who bring different lenses from their walk of life. Today, I've got Colin Jost with me, comedian bar none. And definitely not an astrophysicist. Non-astrophysicist. I'm Colin Jost, not an astrophysicist. You're reading me these questions. I've never seen them before in these moments, but they come to us in all of our media outlets, Facebook. Actually, on Facebook, we are StarTalk Radio, and they come via Twitter. StarTalk Radio is our Twitter handle. And what else do they come? Also on our website, startalkradio.net. So. And here's one that's pretty great from- Did I finish answering the other question? I don't think I did. Oh no, so I didn't quite understand it. Yeah. Because it's Superman, he goes back, he finds out, he sees through a telescope, Krypton is being destroyed, you know, in the past, as you know, the traces of it. Because that light is just coming to reach us now. Just reaching us now. So he flies out there, does his time travel, whirly gig around the planet, spins it back, saves Krypton, but then that means he never traveled to Earth. That's correct. So what is that? Where does that leave him physically? It means it doesn't- It can't happen. Right, right. I mean, it's not simply a paradox. It's a contradiction of what is even possible. So here's, consider it this way. With a telescope, he can go look and see Krypton in the past. Yes, that's true. Which is crazy. However, okay, as he travels to Krypton, Krypton is still advancing into the future while he's traveling. He'd have to travel faster than light in order to go back in time to then. But can he do that, right? Can he? He's Superman and we demonstrated earlier he can travel faster than light. So could he? We said that already. Superman won. Right, so he can do that. Okay, so, all right, so yes. So he sees it destroyed, then he travels faster than light, gets there before the star explodes. But he can't save, they're all powerful folks back there. Somebody would have saved the star. They knew the star was gonna die. And plus, back then, he was a baby. So what's he gonna do? I don't know. Don't you think somebody there would have figured out how to save Krypton? Or someone would have done the time travel thing on their own, the spinning thing. No, but time travel doesn't stop the star from- Right, right, they would have figured out the star, more physical solution. What they would have done was move to another star. Right. Just do what the hermit crab- If they could send him away, just they all gotta get out of there. Right, just all, just hightail out of there. Go find a star. That's what hermit crabs do. This became a question for Superman's parents. What are you doing? Exactly. What were you thinking, guys? But they had to get that Moses thing going, you know, send them for it and save it. It makes a better story. It makes a better story. They were martyrs for the sake of fiction. This is a question from Google Plus from Steven Burkhart, and he asks, he says, fun questions. So he's already saying it's fun. We'll be the judge of that. Yeah, we're very cocky. Great question here. What element-based life form other than carbon would you be most interested in finding? Silicon, tungsten, potassium, et cetera. Oh, it's silicon, of course. And why is that the most- Oh, well, because if you remember your periodic table of elements from your chemistry class- Of course. You mean SI? That mysterious chart of boxes on the wall. You might remember that columns of elements have the same configuration of electrons in their outer shells, which means they combine with the same other elements. So every way you can make a molecule with carbon, you can make that same molecule with silicon. So carbon monoxide, CO, you can make silicon monoxide. Carbon dioxide, you can make silicon dioxide. Wherever you find carbon in the human body, you can swap in a silicon atom for it. So in principle, you can make life based on silicon, and silicon is kind of abundant, although not as abundant as carbon. It's plenty of silicon out there. And if you were trying to invent another kind of life based on the model that we now have, a silicon based life would be, would be cool. Could we, could we somehow, could we somehow create beings that are, you know, genetically the same, but replacing silicon with... Today we have tools to manipulate atoms. There's been no reason why we couldn't swap one atom at a time. Well, it just so happens I have those tools right here. You've got those nanotools. So what'd be interesting is if you imagine maybe a silicon based life form superhero, that'd be kind of interesting. I wonder what that would be like. What kind of powers it would have. But yes, the molecules are the same, but the properties would be different. They might have different strengths, different capacity to think, different acuity of vision. This would be interesting to explore, something I've never done. The problem is that the heavier you get on the periodic table, rapidly they become more rarer and rarer. So if you want any chance of life happening spontaneously, it's got to be just hanging out doing nothing, and carbon fits that bill marvelously. I think we've run out of time. Unless you have a really fast question. Let's see. Favorite Avengers. Favorite Avenger. I'd have to say Thor throwing a hammer. That's so primal, right? It's low tech. Yeah, everyone gets it. If you were a baby and that was his rattle, that's what you just, it is so, he is how you feel, you know? I don't like you and then you smash him. Everyone is a Thor after 5 p.m. That's what BamBam was in the Flintstones, right? We got to wrap it up. This is the end of the superhero show. This is a treat. The Cosmic Queries. Colin, thanks for coming on to StarTalk Radio. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. And as always, I bid you not only farewell, but I compel you to keep looking up. That was a good Cosmic Query session. When we come back, I'll have Bill Nye the Science Guy and co-writer of Cosmos, Steven Soter, to talk to us more about science fiction. Specifically, how it's portrayed in the movies. This is the Cosmic Crib section of StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. With me in my Cosmic Crib, which is really just code for my office at the Hayden Planetarium, here at the American Museum of Natural History, I got Steve Soder, friend and colleague. He's an associate of the Hayden Planetarium. I've got Bill Nye, also an associate. Thanks for just coming to chill, just chew the fat. Love the crib. Yeah, well, I want to talk about today, because we're just chilling. We're just chilling. I want to talk about science as represented in movies. And lately there was like Interstellar came out and I tweeted that the lead five characters are all portraying scientists. And in it there have the roles of father or son or mentor or wife or child. Also physicists who change the world who's a woman. Yeah, all sort of all personal relationships are explored in it. I thought that was a good thing. But here we have a movie that fully goes there. It wants the wormhole and a black hole, time dilation. It's all in the movie, all of it. And then I think of other movies that... Also apocalyptic, the world's ending. The earth is no longer livable. Bill, isn't that just the storyline of every science fiction movie? We just tossed it in a little apocalypse. The science fiction movie is they go into space and bad stuff happens. That's the plot of every science fiction movie. Bad stuff's happening on earth. They got to go into space. Yeah, yeah, in that particular case. But I think of movies that have thought a lot about the science that's in them. Interstellar is one of them. As an advisor, they had Kip Thorne, who's one of our colleagues at Caltech. In fact, I have one of his books that's sitting here on my shelf, Gravitation, the only book that you ever learn about just by carrying it around. It's this huge, thick book with the proportions of a New York Yellow Pages. Back when they had some things. Old enough to remember the Yellow Pages. So, by the way, Steve, I walked up into space sciences at Cornell University campus one day. As an undergraduate? As an undergraduate. And there's Carl Sagan. And I'm sure you were there. And Kip Thorne talking about black holes. Falling into a black hole, ending up in another part of the universe at another time. And that was very compelling. And so that was part of the idea of Interstellar is that you'd end up, you would control where you ended up. Well, because you had some access to the space time continuum. But I think of other films, Steve, you've obviously seen Contact of the story, the film, well, there was a book and a film with that. I was impressed with not only the science of that film, but how much attention they gave to public's reaction to the possibility, the reality in that case of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, not just extraterrestrial life. Steve, do you think much about science in films? Do I think much about science in films? Yeah. No, you don't. You just let the film be whatever it is. Yes. Oh, you are so kind. Oh, that's what's so troubling to me. Oh, Steve. Whenever there's, by the way, when there's an airplane disaster movie. Oh, I mean, if they get something clearly wrong, I think about it, yeah. Well, that's where we're trying to head here in the Cosmic Crit. But where did they get something wrong in that? Oh, in contact? Contact, yeah. Yeah, they got something really, really wrong in contact. You didn't know this? I'd forgotten. Oh, no. So I'm sitting next... So I'm at the premiere. Mining your own business. I never got invited to any premiere in my life. I got just 18 years ago, right? And I got invited to a premiere. So there's a New Yorker in LA for a premiere of a movie. So I'd say the stupid thing, like there's popcorn on display. And I said, how much is the popcorn? And the guy said, oh, it's $17. And then they all started laughing. Because it's all free. It's a premiere. The movie company pays for everything. I didn't know this. I was an idiot. You were just young and naive. What happened was... Young and naive equals idiot. So here's what happened. So I'm there. I'm sitting next to Frank Drake. He's a professor of astronomy at Cornell. Famous for what? The Drake Equation. The Drake Equation. Bill, recite the Drake Equation. Tell us what it is. You estimate the likelihood, the number of intelligent life forms that would be in your galaxy or the cosmos based on multiplying a series of what I would call fudge factors. It's multiplicative. It's algebraic. You multiply number of stars times likelihood of planets around stars times likelihood of planets like Earth around stars times likelihood of planets like Earth that have intelligent life times likelihood of planets with intelligent life right now. Technology, right, right. Even because there are, if I may, billions and billions of stars, you end up with a pretty significant number of intelligent lives. So watch what happens. So Jodie Foster, her character, is there next to... Arroway. Ellie Arroway is there next to... Matthew McConaughey's character is in both movies. Yeah, and he's Palmer Johns or whatever his name is. He's a... What's his name? He's a failed priest. Well, he's a medium priest. Some success. Or some pastor. Right. So anyway, so they're there. That's not even relevant. They're there and she is talking about the romance of the night sky and he's up there saying, so what do you think about it? And she says, you know, if there were a hundred billion stars in our galaxy... That's fine. A hundred billion is fine. To astronomical accuracy is fine. If only one in a million had planets, and only one in a million of those had life, and only one in a million of those had intelligent life, that still leaves millions of planets. Right, right. And I say, oh, I'm sitting right next to a freak and I can't... Ten to the ninth times ten to the minus six times ten to the minus six. You're left with one millionth of a civilization to find. I remember that now. They blew that. Yes. Yeah, yeah, they blew that. And then I said, I'm blaming Jodie Foster for that. Because that was her best take, bro. I'm blaming Jodie Foster because last I checked, like she went to Yale, right? You think they have arithmetic at Yale. So she would know to check this number that's coming out of her mouth. She's playing a character. And you don't know what happens later in the screenplay, Mr. Professional Character Actor Guy. You've got to read the lines that you are given. Because maybe it had to be that. So it's the script writer. It's the script writer. But still, I mean, yeah. So, but that was a quibble. I mean, I thought the movie was brilliantly conceived, especially how the public interacted. Yeah, but I say this all the time as CEO of the Planetary Society, as a product of the Frank Drake influence, the Carl Sagan influence and the Steve Soder influence, if we were to discover life on another world and the places to look that we could do in my lifetime and listener's lifetime is Mars and Europa, the moon of Jupiter. So far, it's Enceladus, the moon of Saturn. I was going to throw the... Enceladus is... Good candidate. It's good, but it's a whole other... It's not seawater. But Steve, you lived through this. In my day, the planets were the great destinations until Voyager, and the Voyager revealed that the moons... Are more interesting... . were where the action is, and that you could have a civilization possibly on a moon of a larger planet that might not even have a rocky surface to land on. A good-sized moon, though. We're not messing around. It's got to be good-sized, like moon-sized moons. Well, there's bigger than moon-sized moons in our solar system. Yeah, Ganymede is a little bigger. And there's Titan, which has an atmosphere which is a lot denser than the atmosphere of the Earth. So Titan rocks. Yeah. Apparently it is rocky with oceans and tides. It's icy. But it's oceans of liquid methane. It has hydrological cycle. It has weather. It has rain. It has clouds like the Earth. But the liquid involved is methane, not water. Because it's so cold out there. So just listen everybody. These guys are talking about real furnace. If we were life-form based on liquid methane, we would not even be saying it's cold. That's just the natural temperature. We're just saying that the Earth is a furnace. And we come to the Earth, we would like combust. Right. Because we have methane in our... Dr. T, you're a what? Wait, wait, wait. If I went there and inhaled some methane, and they came to Earth, where there's oxygen in the atmosphere, I should not go near any candles. Isn't that correct? Yes. Because the methane will combust on contact with the oxygen. If there's still enough of it, wouldn't you exhale? Yes. Yeah. Right. Now, your wife's from Fairbanks. But she's raised in Fairbanks, Alaska. And it's a big party. A buddy of mine, a guy I went to high school with, it's a big day when it's minus 40, because they can pour propane on the ground. It stays a liquid. Yeah, so my wife's sister, who we visited often, when it gets that cold, their propane tanks liquefy, and so they can't get gas into the stove. So they've got to go out, heat the propane tank, so that it vaporizes, so that they can unturn the... This is like life in Alaska. And it's fun for them. That aside, by the way... No, but why don't we get back to movies? Here, so Bill, what science movie do you think got it the best? Well, I think Contact. So you agree with me on that. I'm not just jumping on the bandwagon, but I really very much enjoyed, until it got too weird, 2001. Oh, yeah, 2001 got weird. I won't say Jump the Shark. It just went back in time with... I think 2001, had they known about wormholes and black holes? They would have used it. They would have used it. Sure, who wouldn't? Actually, they had a scene that was like going through a wormhole in 2001, if you remember. No, that's not quite right, but it's not whole like. It's very... We don't know what a wormhole looks like. One of the insights that you do get from Interstellar... I know what a wormhole looks like. Sure, you do. One of the insights that you do get from Interstellar, despite what else you might not get from it, is that a black wormhole is a sphere. You can come in any direction. Yeah, a hole in space is a sphere, that's correct. It's a three-dimensional hole. There's another movie, I think, that is under-appreciated or under-spoken of its science, and that's Deep Impact. No, let me tell you what. It's an asteroid hits Earth. Yeah, yeah, that's important. Unlike Armageddon, where the asteroid parts had good aim, and one hits the Eiffel Tower, one decapitates the Chrysler building, maybe I'm mixing up a couple of movies, but basically, they aim the asteroids to civilization's icons. In Deep Impact, they said, look, most of the world is ocean. Let's just have the sucker hit the ocean. You can still destroy the coastal cities with a huge tsunami, which they did for New York. By the way, they had very good science consulting, and they took them seriously. This is my point. So you saw Deep Impact. Yeah, yeah, they did it right. Unlike Armageddon, which I couldn't even, I don't even criticize Armageddon because it's too over... It's over the top. By the way, listeners, something I'd like you to think about is an asteroid impact and what we would do about an oncoming impactor. There is no evidence that the ancient dinosaurs had a space program. No evidence at all. They didn't have opposable thumbs and they had that walnut-sized brain. You don't know. You don't know what they could have gone wrong. It was littler. It depends on who you're talking with. The brains might have been bigger than ours, but their bodies were so much bigger that... But, you guys, you can be dismissive. But when I watch how ants can get organized, termites can get astonishing things done, you don't know what the ancient dinosaurs could have pulled off. That said... If they had gotten organized. That said, we're the guys with the problem, we're the people, we're the organisms with the problem if there is an impact or a coming toward us. And another thing to think about science fiction wise is maybe the reason we've never heard from another civilization is because they did not pass an asteroid test. They did not deflect an oncoming asteroid. So they've all gone extinct by their own asteroid. Control delete out there, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Guys, we've got to wrap it up. This is the Cosmic Crib. Bill, thanks for being, thanks for coming by the office. Thank you. It's cozy. Yeah, Steven Soter, thanks for coming by as always. Likewise. Alright, this is Neil deGrasse Tyson signing off from StarTalk Cosmic Crib.