Alien Sightings with David Spergel

Summary

StarTalk Radio Episode Summary: "Alien Sightings with David Spergel"

Release Date: December 17, 2024
Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Guest: David Spergel, Astrophysicist and President of the Simons Foundation

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1. Introduction to the Episode and Guest

Neil deGrasse Tyson welcomes his co-host Chuck Nice and introduces David Spergel, a renowned astrophysicist with an illustrious career spanning roles such as chairing NASA's UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) Independent Study Team and leading the science definition team for the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope.

Notable Quote:
Neil deGrasse Tyson [04:06]: "Welcome to StarTalk. Dude. We came up together in graduate school and we intersected more thoroughly when I was a postdoc at Princeton and he was on the faculty there."

2. Understanding UAPs: From UFOs to UAPs

The discussion kicks off with the rebranding of UFOs to UAPs by the government, aiming for a more scientific terminology. Spergel explains the rational approach their team took in studying UAPs, emphasizing the importance of data over speculation.

Notable Quotes:
Chuck Nice [03:47]: "You remember what happened to UFOs? They got rebranded by the government to UAPs. Unidentified Aerial Phenomena."
David Spergel [05:17]: "Approached it the way we approach scientific questions."

3. David Spergel’s Role and Recommendations to NASA

Spergel elucidates his transition from a leading scientist to advising Congress on UAPs. He emphasizes that only about 1% of UAP sightings remain unexplained after thorough analysis, attributing most sightings to mundane explanations like balloons or drones.

Notable Quotes:
David Spergel [05:21]: "Look at the data you have and you realize much of the data could be explained. Balloons, drones."
Neil deGrasse Tyson [07:00]: "So, David, how did you morph from Mr. Head Honcho Scientist, big man on campus, to alien UFO guy for Congress?"

4. Data Collection and Crowdsourcing

Spergel advocates for improved data collection through a crowdsourced app that leverages the advanced capabilities of modern smartphones, including high-quality imaging, GPS, and sensor data. This approach aims to gather comprehensive and reliable data to better understand UAPs.

Notable Quotes:
David Spergel [08:08]: "You should not ignore things you don't understand. If there are things you don't understand, what do you want to do? Get better data."
Neil deGrasse Tyson [10:20]: "So I'd have the app on my phone. I see something I don't understand, I take a picture, and the metadata in that image I just uploaded to the app."

5. Government Transparency and Conspiracies

The conversation delves into the skepticism surrounding government transparency on UAPs. Spergel counters conspiracy theories by highlighting the tendency of government leaks to actually reveal more information, thereby increasing transparency rather than hiding it.

Notable Quotes:
David Spergel [19:39]: "I've worked with government agencies for a long time. Government agencies leak. And if anyone's going to get more funding from the leak, it definitely leaks."
Neil deGrasse Tyson [20:40]: "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. There it is."

6. Scientific Findings from UAP Studies

Despite extensive data collection, Spergel reiterates that there is no convincing evidence of extraterrestrial technology. He emphasizes the need for more data and better tools to continue the investigation into UAPs.

Notable Quotes:
David Spergel [13:57]: "We did not see any convincing evidence for the existence of aliens."
Chuck Nice [14:07]: "You didn't lie."
David Spergel [28:09]: "So we don't know the distance to the object."

7. Computational Astrophysics and the Dark Matter Problem

Shifting gears, the discussion explores the realm of computational astrophysics and its pivotal role in advancing our understanding of the universe. Spergel highlights breakthroughs in simulating complex cosmic phenomena and delves into the enduring mystery of dark matter, which constitutes about 26% of the universe's mass-energy content.

Notable Quotes:
David Spergel [52:20]: "Atoms make up about 4 or 5% of the universe. Dark matter is five times as much of it. We don't know what it is."
Neil deGrasse Tyson [54:35]: "And I attended a lecture you gave one time, and you also gave evidence that it's not lost socks."

8. NASA’s Telescopes and International Collaborations

Spergel discusses the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, a space-based observatory set to revolutionize our understanding of dark matter and dark energy. He contrasts it with ground-based telescopes like the Vera Rubin Observatory, emphasizing the complementary nature of space and ground observations. Additionally, he highlights the collaborative efforts between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) in projects like the Euclid mission.

Notable Quotes:
David Spergel [40:02]: "I helped lead the science team for it when we started. I helped lead the design of it."
Neil deGrasse Tyson [43:52]: "And I was in one of the panels that was establishing scoping, what the expected science would be from the Hubble Telescope."

9. Closing Remarks on Science Funding and Cosmic Perspective

Neil deGrasse Tyson concludes the episode by emphasizing the crucial role of funding agencies like NASA in enabling scientific discoveries. He underscores the importance of international collaborations and the collective effort required to advance our cosmic understanding.

Notable Quotes:
Neil deGrasse Tyson [60:17]: "Science funding agencies, I want you to think of them as fundamental as the science itself, because without them, there is no science."
David Spergel [61:23]: "Glad to see you again, Chuck."

---

Key Insights and Conclusions

• Scientific Approach to UAPs: The study of UAPs is grounded in data analysis and skeptical inquiry, with most sightings attributed to explainable phenomena.

• Crowdsourcing Data Collection: Leveraging modern smartphone technology can enhance data quality and aid in better understanding unexplained aerial phenomena.

• Transparency Over Conspiracy: Government agencies, particularly NASA, emphasize transparency in their studies, countering prevalent conspiracy theories.

• Role of Computational Astrophysics: Advanced simulations and computational techniques are pivotal in unraveling complex cosmic mysteries, including dark matter and galaxy formation.

• International Collaboration: Successful astronomical missions often result from international partnerships, exemplifying the collective human pursuit of knowledge.

• Importance of Funding: Continuous support and funding from agencies like NASA are essential to sustain and advance scientific research.

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Neil deGrasse Tyson [05:03]: "So, David, how did you morph from Mr. Head Honcho Scientist, big man on campus, to alien UFO guy for Congress?"

• David Spergel [08:08]: "You should not ignore things you don't understand. If there are things you don't understand, what do you want to do? Get better data."

• Neil deGrasse Tyson [20:40]: "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. There it is."

• David Spergel [52:20]: "Atoms make up about 4 or 5% of the universe. Dark matter is five times as much of it. We don't know what it is."

---

This episode offers a deep dive into the scientific investigation of UAPs, the challenges of data collection, and the broader landscape of astrophysical research. David Spergel's insights bridge the gap between combating misconceptions and advancing our understanding of the universe's most enigmatic components.

Transcript

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So Chuck, I'm worried about you because we blew your mind today. Yeah, and your voice went up three octaves in reactions.

[Chuck Nice]

Actually, we discovered things that basically gave me a small stroke.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so I don't mean to laugh at that fact, but deep physics mixed with the universe. We call that astrophysics.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, without a doubt.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And there's nothing like it in the universe.

[Chuck Nice]

Smoke some weed for this one.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Check it out Coming up. Smoke some weed. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Chuck. Nice. Right here with me.

[Chuck Nice]

Hey, Neil.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, ma'am, you know who we. What we're going to do today?

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, my gosh.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

We got a good one.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We got a good one.

[Chuck Nice]

We got a good one.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We got a good one. You remember what happened to UFOs? They got rebranded by the government to UAPs. Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Yeah. Yeah. And I had an inside guy on that operation. Let me introduce all of you to my friend and colleague, David Spergel.

[David Spergel]

David, pleasure to be here.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Welcome to StarTalk. Dude. We came up together in graduate school and we intersected more thoroughly when I was a postdoc at Princeton and he was on the faculty there and then became chairman. And I knew him when he was just a scientist. Now he's running everything. Right? I'm looking what my boy is running. So. You chaired NASA's UAP. Unidentified Aeroflot Independent Study Team. You chaired that. But that's not. You're president of the Simons Foundation. We'll get more into that later. You chaired the science definition team for the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. Okay, we'll learn more about that if we have time. You're also on the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Institute for Science. Carnegie. Isn't that the same group where Edwin Hubble worked? For them, yes. This is a long legacy.

[David Spergel]

Long and really impressive tradition.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So, David, how did you morph from Mr. Head Honcho Scientist, big man on campus, to alien UFO guy for Congress?

[David Spergel]

Approached it the way we approach scientific questions.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[David Spergel]

Approach it the way things we don't understand. So you look at the data you have and you realize much of the data could be explained. Balloons, drones. Anything with flashing lights is an airplane. You know, aliens who are coming here who want to be hidden, don't put flashing lights on them.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Spergel]

On their UFOs.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly. Like Undercover cops. They don't like. You don't see an undercover cop in a marked police car with sirens. With sirens blazing and lights flashing. Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. But that doesn't preclude the possibility that alien craft would have flashing lights. In fact, the mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind had tons of flashing lights.

[Chuck Nice]

Was nothing but flashing lights. It was like a dog on disco in the sky.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It wasn't disco crazy in the sky.

[David Spergel]

Yeah, I'm not sure flashing lights really make sense for a spaceship.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[David Spergel]

But anyway, there's a bunch of things that. Look, when you look at them carefully, they're camera defects. I think we've all taken pictures of people where the sun glint got in and ruined the picture.

[Chuck Nice]

Correct.

[David Spergel]

So there's some lens flare. Lens flares. Right. And then you go through.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I think if that's happening a million times a day.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Something in there is going to be interesting. You're going to find Jesus in one of the.

[Chuck Nice]

Absolutely.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

One of the lens flares. Yes. Right.

[Chuck Nice]

That's my religion.

[David Spergel]

And then you look through that. And then there were some things we don't understand.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[David Spergel]

Right. So there's some events.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Approximately what fraction?

[David Spergel]

About a percent.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

One percent.

[Chuck Nice]

One percent?

[David Spergel]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

All right. Okay.

[David Spergel]

So about 1% of the events. In the military had a study that went through this. We've used a lot of their work. About 1% are not understood.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wait, can we back up for a sec? Who appointed this committee?

[David Spergel]

NASA. NASA.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

NASA. NASA. Okay, gotcha.

[David Spergel]

So this is to give advice to NASA on how they could help advance our understanding.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Was this requested by Congress?

[David Spergel]

No, it was requested by the head of NASA.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so NASA wanted to play in the sandbox.

[David Spergel]

Yep.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. Okay. And NASA is among the most transparent agencies.

[Chuck Nice]

Absolutely.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And among the most transparent.

[Chuck Nice]

And they have no reason to. They don't have an agenda.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[David Spergel]

There was nothing about our study that was classified. I have no clearances, so we can talk openly about everything we did and we looked at the events that we didn't understand.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

By the way, when you have the highest level of clearance, that's what you would say. You say, I don't have any clearance.

[David Spergel]

But I don't have any clearance.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's exactly what a high clearance person would say. No, go on.

[David Spergel]

The data was ambiguous. We didn't understand it, but it wasn't like it was something clear. And one of the points we made was, as scientists, again, this is the.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

1% that we don't know what they are.

[David Spergel]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. Okay.

[David Spergel]

Yeah. No. And when you don't understand something, you don't jump to the most exciting conclusion.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Spergel]

You don't say, it's gotta be aliens. You know, you look at it and say, it's something I don't know. But you don't ignore it either.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[David Spergel]

You should not ignore things you don't understand. If there are things you don't understand, what do you want to do? Get better data. And that really was our message to NASA. If they wanted to contribute to this, they should help get Better data. Right now, everyone is carrying in their back pocket a device that takes really high quality digital images.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[David Spergel]

Accurately records the time.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[David Spergel]

Measures GPS position.

[Chuck Nice]

Correct.

[David Spergel]

Measures the local magnetic field. Measures the local gravitational field.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Do you do all that?

[David Spergel]

It does all that. That's why it knows how you're orienting your phone.

[Chuck Nice]

Clearly, that's not an Android.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So, hey.

[David Spergel]

I've got an iPhone, and there are billions of them around the planet.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So wait, so you're saying when it knows which way is north, is it using the magnetic north or is it correct? It's got to correct for that.

[David Spergel]

It's got to correct for that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so it knows where I am on Earth. Corrects for the magnetic north is what we call it.

[Chuck Nice]

And then it gets you the true north.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The true north. Okay.

[David Spergel]

Yep. And gets it. It is really amazing what that device measures your phone. And if you can imagine if we had pictures of something we didn't understand, taken by citizens from a whole bunch of different perspectives. You can.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Different sight lines.

[David Spergel]

Different sight lines. You'd be able to reconstruct the event.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[David Spergel]

To know how fast the object is moving, how far away it is, and.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Not be susceptible to someone's capacity to interpret what they see.

[David Spergel]

That's right. So it's not a single blurry image, but tens of high quality images. And you don't have to worry about things like camera flares because you've got multiple. Multiple images and multiple images. So our recommendation to NASA was to develop an app and to develop.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

There's an app for that.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, my gosh.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. What's the app?

[David Spergel]

It doesn't exist yet. So this was our recommendation that they fund the development of something like this and that they use this to collect more data.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I'd have the app on my phone. I see something I don't understand, I take a picture, and the metadata in that image I just uploaded to the app. To the app in some simple way. You want to simplify it as much as possible. And then that goes to a central place, and then you can have people there that can correlate the. Correlate the data.

[David Spergel]

And we said just try to make everything public.

[Chuck Nice]

So you're crowdsourcing the data gathering itself.

[David Spergel]

Yep.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[David Spergel]

So I, you know, people are everywhere. Yeah, people are everywhere.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Spergel]

And I felt this was a teachable moment, a chance to say, what do we do as scientists? We collect data, we verify data, we check data quality. I did a bunch of TV interviews on this. As soon as I started talking about checking data quality, they Ended the interview. They wanted to hear about Elliot.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah. Don't be so boring, dude.

[David Spergel]

But it's like, you want to make sure that people didn't put in fake images.

[Chuck Nice]

I just love it. He's just like, of course we gather data. We check data quality. They were like, this guy has integrity. Get him the hell out of here.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, but what you're saying is, in an era where we have Photoshop and even more advanced and even AI generating images, you want to make sure you need some way to authenticate what the camera caught.

[Chuck Nice]

And that didn't even occur to me. See how I'm thinking, yeah, you take a picture. But the fact is that those Photoshop type programs, they exist on your phone. You don't have to actually go.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

It's like you could just hit a button on your phone and start manipulating an image right then and there.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

You had to go take it and.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Import it someplace to your computer, mess with it and put it back on.

[Chuck Nice]

No, now you can just do it right when you take the picture. So that makes sense.

[David Spergel]

No, I mean, it's not hard to take a picture shaking the hand of a friend and replace the picture of the friend with, I don't know, Dr. Spock, whoever your favorite alien is.

[Chuck Nice]

That would be mine.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Spock was half alien. I think that's true.

[Chuck Nice]

Half Vulcan.

[David Spergel]

The mother was on this show.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We have to be very accurate about that.

[Chuck Nice]

Mom was human, dad was sore act.

[David Spergel]

That's all I'm saying.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's all I'm saying. So you presented your results more than a year ago. What has happened since then?

[David Spergel]

You know, NASA's considering developing these things to do that. Needs new money.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, yeah. Okay. A little pot of money.

[David Spergel]

And last year was a very tough year for NASA's budget.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right.

[David Spergel]

NASA took a huge budget cut.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I remember that.

[David Spergel]

Yeah. So they had to cancel programs.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[David Spergel]

So they were not about to start something new. I mean, when we started, they thought there'd be some new monies from Congress. They'd be able to say, here's a program that we would go to the community. And we thought about that as, like, here's something NASA could do that would involve citizens.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[David Spergel]

And they just. At a time at which they were canceling missions, they just did not want to do anything.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's really a shame, because at least it's on the radar, that it's something to do if money then becomes available.

[David Spergel]

Yep.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

In a way, don't you think that's a big mistake? Because here's What I'm picking up from what you're saying, you are immediately enlisting the public and getting people to focus on NASA. You're getting them excited about the one thing that everybody can agree is exciting, which is are we being visited? And you're saying, okay, here's an app. Get involved. Like, I would take money from someplace else and put it into that.

[David Spergel]

Yeah, but we also said, which I think is true, we did not see any convincing evidence for the existence of aliens.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, now see, there's a problem. You didn't lie.

[David Spergel]

And, you know, not seeing convincing evidence doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But that means there's no convincing evidence.

[Chuck Nice]

Absolutely.

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[David Spergel]

Hey, Fidelity.

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

With the Fidelity app, you can choose a schedule and set up recurring investments in stocks and ETFs.

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[Chuck Nice]

You got this?

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Now, where did I put my keys? You will find them where you left them.

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because.

[David Spergel]

We listen to StarTalk every night and.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Support StarTalk on Patreon.

[Chuck Nice]

This is Star Talk with Neil Degrasse Tyson.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I know you very well as not only a friend, but as a fellow astrophysicist. So we have very strong overlap in our training and our brain wiring. You don't want everyone on the committee to have exactly that same brain wiring. So who else was on the committee? What was the nature of their expertise and who selected them?

[David Spergel]

I was selected by NASA. I was involved in advising as committee chair, who was there. So we had a pretty diverse set of people coming from oceanography, atmospheric science, because there's a lot of atmospheric phenomenon. So experts on the ionosphere, some science policy people.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The ionosphere, a layer of the upper atmosphere that is charged, ionized.

[Chuck Nice]

That's where we get the northern lights. Does that happen in the ionosphere?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, maybe higher.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, it does.

[David Spergel]

Yeah, it doesn't, but it starts there. And ionosphere is usually above that. Right. So northern lights are usually a bit lower, but it's, you know, connected phenomena.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. And certain radio frequencies of radio waves reflect off of their ionosphere. Interesting things can happen with the ionosphere that wouldn't happen in any other layer. Oh, yeah. It's pretty wild. Okay, so go on.

[David Spergel]

So we had some people from the intelligence community. Right. Because they have a lot of satellites looking down.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So they would have had clearance even if you didn't. That's right, yes. Okay. We had some in their own business.

[David Spergel]

In their own business. We had some people from technology companies.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Good, right.

[David Spergel]

Who were familiar with some of the technologies out there, Some of the things we can use from space to look down and see what was going on. We had to.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, so some thought went into this.

[David Spergel]

Yeah. Lots of different perspectives around the table.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[David Spergel]

It was actually a really good group of people that I learned a lot from.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, so you had your role in the hearings, but did you watch all the rest of the hearings?

[David Spergel]

I watched some of it, not everything.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Do you have any thoughts or reflections?

[David Spergel]

There were some amazing things that came out that were fun to watch. I don't know if you remember these bodies that were of aliens that were shown to the Mexican Parliament.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Mummies, the Nazca mummies in Mexico put on display. They're like three feet tall and there's like two or three of them.

[David Spergel]

Yeah, yeah. And they're like.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, that came out while you were disappearing.

[David Spergel]

It came out while we were doing it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[David Spergel]

And that was one of these things you look at and say, wait a second. If you actually have something that you think is interesting, what you should do with it is send samples around. Right. Like, you know, send the samples to a hundred labs around the world. And if it's not human DNA, we'll.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Find out quickly without the bias that might be inherent in who produced the bodies.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But in addition, when I saw that, I said, that's exactly what we should be doing. If we have Crashed alien bodies, we should put them on display. But no one did that in the testimony. Everyone kept saying those who claimed it existed said it's in a locked box, and then you can't come and look at it. I thought to myself, an alien in a lockbox that you're not showing anybody is the same thing as no alien at all.

[Chuck Nice]

Lockbox that you're not showing anybody.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Scientifically, it's the same thing.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So how would.

[Chuck Nice]

Can I ask something? I mean, to both of you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

What would be the impetus for not showing the fact that these aliens exist? Why would the government hide this if you know, because conspiracy theorists have their own, you know. But why?

[David Spergel]

I'll turn it around.

[Chuck Nice]

Go ahead.

[David Spergel]

I've worked with government agencies for a long time. Government agencies leak. And if anyone's going to get more funding from the leak, it definitely leaks. So I'm running a lab.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's the answer right there.

[David Spergel]

So, like I am running a lab that had some secret alien stuff. If it leaks and there's lots of information and the alien bodies are shown, I get more funding.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Of course.

[David Spergel]

So one of the reasons that I don't believe the conspiracy theorists is I trust people to look out for their own economic self interest. And the government leaks everything all the time.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

My favorite quote is from Ben Franklin from his Poor Richard's Almanac. It said, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. There it is. The foundation of the documents of the country.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, that's it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. So, but why didn't they bring forward what?

[David Spergel]

Maybe they don't exist.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So the big concern is there could be some kind of alien technology that is so far beyond us that it could pose a security risk. And you're saying Even in the 1% of the things you could not explain, there was nothing there, that, whoa, this could be future technology. Because think about what anything today that's flying through the air would look like to anybody 100 years ago. So it doesn't take much time, Delta, to possibly freak someone out about how advanced you are.

[David Spergel]

So that's part of the story of Area 51. Right. Which was we were. Our military was developing advanced technologies and those were secrets.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This is a cold war. Yes, Cold war, yes.

[David Spergel]

And think about drones. Imagine you saw a drone 25, 30 years ago. I'd never seen one.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. Just moving, just moving in any direction that it went up and down, all along any axis, any axis, instantly. Instantly.

[David Spergel]

Yes, you would think a drone. And with no human in control.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Spergel]

You would think a drone that we're totally used to is an alien spaceship. Right. And you know, so there's technologies out there. If you look at a lot of the reported events, there are a number of them that were of those events were associated with things seen by military pilots. And you have to ask yourself, who is going to be trying to see what our military pilots are doing? They fly all the way here from some other planet to study our planes deployed outside of Taiwan, or is it the Chinese? And one of the things that came out during our study may remember this Chinese balloon.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[David Spergel]

Right, right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We love the Chinese balloon.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[David Spergel]

Right. So it is very clear that the United States.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Did we shoot it down. We shot it down.

[Chuck Nice]

We shot it down.

[David Spergel]

The United States is spying on the Chinese military. The Chinese are spying on the US Military. This is like their job.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And so we part of the security value of monitoring and getting this information. If I remember correctly, back in was it the 60s, the government did not disavow UFO sightings. They wanted to promote people's awareness of them in case they saw something that Russia was sending over. And then we get firsthand knowledge because people are everywhere and the military isn't. And so there were strategic value to this as far as the military is concerned. That's still the case.

[David Spergel]

You know, you look at the war in Ukraine and both the Ukrainians and the Russians are relying on citizens following drones. They've got apps on their phones.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right.

[David Spergel]

When you see a drone fly over. So they know to shoot it down.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So where are we now in this? Why were there still hearings just a few weeks ago, a year after these other hearings, when I thought everything got aired as much as it needed to be.

[David Spergel]

You know, I think people like conspiracies. People want to believe.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, they do.

[David Spergel]

And people are not comfortable with ambiguity. Right. To say, you know, we look at lots of data and there's a few things we don't understand. They'd rather jump to some exciting conclusion.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Than just sit there in ignorance.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. It makes you feel better though.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You know, every science, you hit something you don't understand. That excites us.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We don't immediately come up with an explanation. We might have an hypothesis, but not without justifying it with more data or better data.

[Chuck Nice]

I mean, let's be honest, most people are not scientists. Most people see a splotch on a piece of toast and they're like, it's Jesus. So let's be honest, I've seen some.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Pretty good Jesus Renderings, though.

[Chuck Nice]

There's some good ones. There's been some good ones.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's Renaissance Jesus, though. Always.

[Kia Representative]

Always.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's when he was most painted, probably.

[David Spergel]

Yeah. You know, Jesus in most of those paintings looks like he's from the local town. There's a lot of blonde Jesuses, right?

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. That's so funny. Yeah. You never get Afro Jesus. Afro Jesus on the piece of toast. Pull the toast out the toaster oven. I couldn't believe it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Afro Jesus. Jesus was Jewish. It'd be a Jewish Afro.

[Chuck Nice]

It would be.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. That's how that would have happened, definitely. Now, in our field, we in science in general, we greatly devalue eyewitness testimony if we have another way of obtaining the data. With UFOs, it's kind of only eyewitness testimony because it comes upon you, not when you're already with measuring equipment. And so apart from the smartphone, what else does someone have to offer you but the eyewitness testimony that they've experienced?

[David Spergel]

You know, eyewitness testimony is just not very reliable. I mean, this is something that we've.

[Chuck Nice]

Learned about talking to a black man here. Just saying.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. So there's a lot.

[David Spergel]

I mean, this isn't aliens. Right. This is just a lot of court cases of people who were unjustly convicted, positively identified.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Positively identified by eyewitness.

[David Spergel]

By eyewitness. And then.

[Chuck Nice]

And even without malicious intent, sometimes malicious, but most times not just people going, no, that's him. That's the one. Or because they were shown something, Shown.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

A piece of lights on. No, actually. Right, right.

[David Spergel]

I was three blocks away, you know, and there's just lots of problems with eyewitness testimony.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Spergel]

And I think this is actually more important for understanding things in the context of our justice system than for UFOs.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right, of course.

[David Spergel]

Right. But we have cameras, and we don't have cameras. We have early warning radar systems. I mean, when we step back and think about what data does the military have, what data does the scientific community have? We are monitoring space and the environment around us all the time.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And I further add to that, I think I ran the numbers on this. There's a million people at any given moment who are airborne with a window right. Sitting next to them.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And so if the mothership is coming, we can totally crowdsource that.

[David Spergel]

We also monitor everything coming into the solar system.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Spergel]

So if there was something big coming into the solar system, this guy's got.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

More power than I knew we'd see it.

[David Spergel]

Yes, well, we certainly. The military certainly Monitors everything flying into the US Right. You cannot fly a plane from, you know, Europe to the US without someone noticing.

[Chuck Nice]

Right, right.

[David Spergel]

So we're monitoring a lot around us. So we do know a lot about our environment. And as we go through all of that data and, you know, lots of people have done this, there isn't any convincing evidence of advanced technologies beyond what we have.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So what about the famous monochromatic Tic Tac that everybody saw of the F18 Navy pilots that reported? And you hear them going, oh, my gosh, what is that?

[Chuck Nice]

It's an orb. And it's. And it's moving too. Right.

[David Spergel]

So we don't know the distance to the object.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Why not? Don't they have tools get distances, so they need a new airplane? If they can't know, I'm sorry.

[David Spergel]

Well, no, they don't. You know, the data quality for those events were not terrific. You'd like to have more measurements? Those. You know, I said there's a percent, you know, there's a percent or so that we don't understand. That is like, absolutely part of that. Right? That is. That is.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, that one is.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's one of the centerpiece of the one.

[David Spergel]

That's one of the centerpiece ones. And you look at and say, that's strange. The next thing you think is, let's get some more data. How far away is that? How fast is it moving?

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Spergel]

Could that be explained by conventional technologies, by balloons? Far away? Is there something normative? It could be. We don't know. We need better. But the data we have is pretty.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I heard someone in the security space suggest that wouldn't this restricted airspace be an ideal place for the military to just put an anomalous object into the sensors, to just see how their pilots react?

[Chuck Nice]

A scrimmage test.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Scrimmage. Oh, yes, yes.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

See what they do.

[Chuck Nice]

See what they do.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Do they try to shoot at it? Are they puzzled by it? If that did happen, then they don't want to tell anybody that that's what they happened because part of the reaction is part of what they're looking to find out, how it happened.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. Yeah. The whole thing is to. It's a stress test. You're trying to figure out, okay, how are we going to respond? And so you create the circumstances where you can measure your own response, your.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Own response to something.

[David Spergel]

And one of the things to keep in mind about, actually, both military and commercial pilots, their job is not to investigate funny things out their window.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Spergel]

If you're a United pilot flying from Newark To Chicago. You see something weird out your window, you go and announce to the people on your plane, we're gonna be an hour late going into Chicago. I'm gonna circle around and look at that weird object from some other side. That is your last day as a pilot. And if you're a military pilot, you are being timed constantly on how fast you get from point A to point B. You are not trained and your sensors are not set up in a way to collect data. It's not Star Trek, right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

To boldly go. To seek out new life.

[Chuck Nice]

To seek out new life. No.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And new civilizations.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. Cause every minute you're up there, there's millions of dollars.

[David Spergel]

It costs millions of dollars to keep you up in the air. The military's job is to protect. Protect the country.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Spergel]

Their job is not to study unidentified scientific phenomena. Right. That's NASA's job.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Tell me about this new phenomenon that was identified by the crowdsourced. By crowdsourced observations of phenomena in the sky.

[David Spergel]

So one really interesting phenomena are sprites.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Tell me about it.

[David Spergel]

So lightning sprites are something that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's a new flavor salt drink. Yeah.

[David Spergel]

No, it's basically upward going lightning. 10 times more common than regular lightning. Pilots would report seeing this stuff, but they were so fast that people dismissed it and it turns out to be a really common phenomenon. And go into images, Google, type in lightning sprites, S, P, R, I, R, T, E. Like the old software. Like, okay, you'll see amazing images. And these images were dismissed until we developed the technologies to get fast enough images that we can get lots of images of sprites.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh. Because they're very transitory, they're really fast. So it's very hard to. Oh, what is that? And you get your camera, it's gone.

[Chuck Nice]

It's gone.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right, okay, so the crowdsourcing or encouraging people to document what they see in whatever way they can, whether or not we discover aliens, we might discover new science.

[David Spergel]

I mean, there's some amazing things out there. Like St. Elmo's fire ball.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's a movie. That's a movie.

[David Spergel]

It's a good movie. Nostalgic, you know, we're showing our age. But like, well, wait, so Sam Noble's.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Fire is the discharge at the top of a ship's mast and it was glow. And everyone said, well, that's beautiful. No, dude, you're about to get hit by lightning.

[Chuck Nice]

Lightning. Say goodbye.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Say goodbye.

[Chuck Nice]

So, yeah, can you explain ball lightning, please? I've heard of it. I've never even seen like pictures of it.

[David Spergel]

But so it's a ball of ionized plasma. So like gas that's so hot that there's free electrons moving around.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[David Spergel]

It persists for a while. Like, one of the scary things that I've heard of is like your. There was an incident on an airplane where this ball of lightning rolled down the aisle of the plane and then left.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

How did it get in the plane?

[David Spergel]

It came in a window or the side. I don't know.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The plane is a closed.

[Chuck Nice]

It has a travel agent.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It wanted first class. Wait, wait. I just understand something. The plane is made of metal. How are you going to move ionized material through metal?

[David Spergel]

I actually don't know how it got in. I mean, there's a report. And again, this is something where eyewitness. You work as you can.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

There's a plane on some level is almost a Faraday cage.

[David Spergel]

Yeah, Right. And people have reproduced this phenomenon. It might be a tangled magnet piece of magnetic field with a plasma on it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Holy moly.

[David Spergel]

We don't quite so ball lightning. Not expert on this. My understanding is it's still not well understood.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, cool.

[David Spergel]

So there's, you know, there's stuff out there that. Like that, that are just amazing things we don't fully understand.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I'm gonna paraphrase Hume. I think it was on the subject of miracles, where it was. The likelihood that it could be some new law of physics you're witnessing is greater than the fact that it's actually a miracle. That is.

[Chuck Nice]

That transcends physics itself.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That transcends the law of physics itself.

[Chuck Nice]

Gotcha.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. So in this case, if we're gonna see a phenomenon that is just completely weird and we never had the way to capture it before, it's more likely a natural phenomenon that's new to us than visiting space aliens who were eavesdropping.

[David Spergel]

I think as scientists, we should be guided by Wonderful quote by Galileo. Measure what's measurable and figure out how to make measurable what you can't measure. Oh, interesting.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, wow. Look at that.

[Chuck Nice]

That's a great. That's great.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. That's not his best quote, though.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. You got one better?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, go ahead. The Bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. Ooh, he could wrap that up.

[Chuck Nice]

Yo, let me tell you something. That's a mic drop right there.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's a mic drop. Yeah, That's a good one.

[David Spergel]

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[Chuck Nice]

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, so David, we got the smartphone. Is there some other ideal device you can imagine deploying for people that would get better data than the cell phone itself?

[David Spergel]

I think I would really start with the cell phone because we don't know what the phenomena is.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Spergel]

So you don't invent some new expensive technology when everyone's carrying a cell phone around in their pocket.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But as astrophysicists, we invent new kind of telescopes all the time. They have new detectors. And so even if we don't know what the detector's gonna find. So why deny something similar to the public?

[Chuck Nice]

Cause how are you gonna put that in the hands of everybody?

[David Spergel]

Because I think from can you carry.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

A 100 inch telescope on your back?

[David Spergel]

Yeah. One of the big concerns I have right now is this issue of scientific trust.

[Chuck Nice]

Interesting.

[David Spergel]

People don't trust scientists. They think things are hidden.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Spergel]

I feel it's important to also address the question of, like, the sense of conspiracy, the sense of something's hidden and that by involving the public in acquiring data, looking at data, understanding data, that's.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The most transparent thing you can do.

[David Spergel]

You want to be transparent, you want to be open, especially when there's a sense of hidden conspiracy.

[Chuck Nice]

I think that's Great.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, So I have a very bad segue. Things that are hidden from us that we want to reveal. One of the longest unsolved problems in astrophysics is dark matter. And there's a telescope soon to be launched, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. Did I say that right? Remind me who she is.

[Chuck Nice]

So, Nancy, she was a lady on hln. She talked a lot about crime. I'm sorry, go ahead. I couldn't help myself.

[David Spergel]

So Nancy Grace Roman was the first head of astronomy at NASA. Oh, cool.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh.

[David Spergel]

So she was one of the really early pioneers.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just to remind people, NASA launches things into space and conducts science as a whole. Separate kind of advocation for the agency. So somebody can head the astronauts go into space and a different person is heading the science.

[David Spergel]

Okay, so think about the person responsible for things like the Hubble telescope in modern times. In modern times, you know, she did some of the first things that would. The precursors to the Hubble telescope. The precursors to the James Webb Space Telescope. Right. So, you know, just like there were the Mercury astronauts, right. At the time you're doing the Mercury astronauts, she is thinking about and leading NASA's efforts to start to do astronomy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And so what is that telescope tuned to detect?

[David Spergel]

So it is set.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And what's your role on that telescope?

[David Spergel]

So I helped lead the science team for it when we started. I helped lead the design of it. I kind of was one of its early advocates to make the case first to the scientific community and then to NASA and Congress that we should.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We don't do anything else. We have very good buy in from the whole community. We're pretty tight in that way. I'm very proud of us.

[Chuck Nice]

Is that to avoid infighting?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. If we infight, it's only among ourselves. But when we have to beg for money, we're pretty tight.

[Chuck Nice]

You gotta be tight.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We're tight on that.

[David Spergel]

And it's going to basically map the entire sky with the resolution of the Hubble telescope.

[Chuck Nice]

Holy crap.

[David Spergel]

So you've seen these Hubble images and they're just amazing. Imagine you can map the whole sky that way. So it's a Hubble quality image, but a much bigger field of view. It could see much more and more advanced technologies. So it'll let us map the whole sky.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So what's the difference between that and the Vera Rubin Telescope, which also has very wide field mapping of the sky.

[David Spergel]

Right. So the Vera Rubin telescope will operate in the optical. It'll do amazing.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So visible light.

[David Spergel]

Visible light. It will do amazing things, but it is still limited by our atmosphere. So this will be in space. So it'll operate in the infrared. It'll be sensitive. It'll be a very nice complement, actually, to the roof.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And as a reminder, infrared doesn't make it to Earth's surface very nicely.

[David Spergel]

And it doesn't make it better. Yeah, doesn't make it to the Earth's surface. And lots of things in the Earth's atmosphere are glowing in the infrared. So you really gain a lot by going to space. And you'll have much sharper images. And I think its legacy will be incredibly broad because you map the whole sky. We're going to discover stuff we hadn't expected. Whenever you point your telescope in new directions, in new ways, nature surprises us.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Plus, I have to put something to rest here. There are many people who think that you miss something if you don't expect it.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. You only will see what you expect.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

As a scientist, if there's something I don't expect, that's the first thing.

[Chuck Nice]

That's the first thing you see.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's like, oh, my gosh. I don't know what that is.

[Chuck Nice]

You don't have search bias.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It is something I've never seen before. Oh, my gosh.

[Chuck Nice]

Looking for your keys, and you missed the $20.

[David Spergel]

So an example I think of is you will come and visit New York City. You come to New York because you want to see the tree lighting at Rockefeller Center. And that's like your plan. I'm going to go there. And that experience is worthwhile. And you see it. And that's like, we designed the telescope to study dark matter. We designed to study nature, dark energy. There's some particular things we're going after. But as you go to Rockefeller center, the best part of that trip to New York might be someone rapping that you hear in the subway. It might be some person you happen to meet. It might be the bar. You might be Elmo. Hopefully it's might be Elmo in Times Square.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Cowboy.

[David Spergel]

Or no, it might be some band you heard at a bar that you went to late at night.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[David Spergel]

And yes, you went to go to Times Square. That, like, you know, when you made your airplane reservations, you planned around getting to the lighting of the Christmas tree. But it's everything.

[Chuck Nice]

What was unexpected ended up being so much better.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[David Spergel]

And that's.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Or interesting.

[Chuck Nice]

A lot more interesting, you know, and.

[David Spergel]

In some ways, that's been the history of astronomy.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[David Spergel]

If you've never seen the Christmas tree at Rockefeller center and the lights on fifth Avenue in The stores go.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's worth going, even if you're Jewish. Go. Yeah, it's interesting.

[David Spergel]

No, I say that as a joke.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. And I was in one of the panels that was establishing scoping, what the expected science would be from the Hubble Telescope.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because we're old enough, we predate the telescope itself. And so you're not going to design a telescope. And unless you have a plan for what this sucker is going to look at and what it's going to, questions it's going to answer. If you look at that document today, most of why we remember the telescope has nothing to do with anything that was forecast for most of it. And that's the real testament to a fertile bit of scientific instruments. Right. So there's a clear difference then of course between the Vera Rubin telescope, which is ground based, which means NASA has nothing to do with it. We just have ground based money and ground based people doing it all over the world, and the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, space born telescope, which is now. It's just amazing. We can just speak of that casually.

[Chuck Nice]

Another space, another space telescope. Yeah, that's right, exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh my gosh. Very cool. Now we're not the only players in town. We got Europe, the European Space Agency, esa, what are they working on right now?

[David Spergel]

So ESA launched Euclid. It's up there in space. Now, Euclid, it does many things. In some ways it's a smaller version of the Nancy Grace Roman telescope.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[David Spergel]

It's up there, it's not as sensitive, its resolution isn't as good, but it's still the most powerful thing we've had up to now.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And it's operational.

[David Spergel]

It's operational now. It's taking data now. They are still calibrating and understanding the data. They have not made most of the data they're taken available yet. They will.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just to be clear, when you have data, any data you have has to be calibrated. Without calibration, the numbers mean nothing.

[Chuck Nice]

Right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. It's a very big part of what we.

[Chuck Nice]

It's like trying to weigh yourself.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, if you don't know, if you just get a scale and springs, you have no idea.

[Chuck Nice]

You have no idea.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What are you calibrating against?

[David Spergel]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And the press never talks about it, the public doesn't know anything about it, and it's half of our effort to calibrate and characterize data.

[Chuck Nice]

Interesting.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Not his. He was a theorist.

[David Spergel]

Well, no, I, you know, I invited.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Him to the telescope in Chile when I was doing my PhD thesis and he's A theorist. There was an earthquake.

[David Spergel]

Not just a earthquake, a level Richter 7 earthquake.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And threw my spectrograph off the thing. I got data. I don't know what I was looking at. And I said, so these are the observer gods saying, we don't want theorists up here with us.

[Chuck Nice]

You just blamed him for an earthquake?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes, I did.

[David Spergel]

I'll take full responsibility.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What the hell were you doing there anyway? I forgot.

[David Spergel]

I went for fun.

[Chuck Nice]

There you have it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right.

[Chuck Nice]

You cannot argue with that answer ever.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay?

[David Spergel]

Euclid is actually a collaboration between NASA.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And esa, and that's how you can get connected to Euclid as you are.

[David Spergel]

And, you know, a lot of these things, NASA and ESA work together. So NASA built the infrared detectors that ride on it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, okay.

[David Spergel]

And with the James Webb Space Telescope, one of the most important instruments was built by the Europeans.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right?

[David Spergel]

So we really do work together when we can.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's a science thing, because politicians haven't figured that out yet.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, unfortunately. Just saying, this is why you guys should be running the world, but you're too busy doing your science.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So, David, we came of age where just before us, there were the observers and the theorists and the theorists. You give them a pencil and a pad, and the observers would go off to telescopes. And then the power of computing became manifest to both branches of our field. And the theorists started using computers. The observers started analyzing data more thoroughly, more quickly. And so does the phrase computational astrophysics mean something specific and different from how that evolved out of those two branches?

[David Spergel]

It's basically those two branches. So when we did theoretical work and started from how we thought the universe began, worked it forward to predict what galaxies were like, we did what we could by pen and paper. And then you reach a point where things start to get complicated, and we couldn't carry out those calculations. So we started to. You do what you can.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You do what you can.

[David Spergel]

And so you start to rely on computers to let you do calculations that you couldn't do otherwise. And those computers have gotten more and more powerful. So we can now do detailed simulations of how stars form, how they evolve, how they explode.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So they're not just comp. You're not just computing formulas. You are running simulations of the universe on timescales that we don't live long enough to see.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And you can do it on the computer.

[Chuck Nice]

That's awesome.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, it is. I love that, you know, what happened in our lifetime, I gotta tell the story. Just in the generation before us, there was a very important observer. Chip Arp. Was his name Halton Arp is his full name. And he compiled a volume of galaxies that just looked weird.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And it was called the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies.

[Chuck Nice]

Cool.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And they were a trove of. If you wanted to study things that were just different from the Nor, you pick objects out of that catalog and bring a different kind of telescope to it. But no one knew how they came to be. What are these things? Is this a new kind of formation process in the universe? Because they're all just weird, oddly shaped galaxies. Oddly shaped. And then there was a movement. Once we could bring computers, and we noticed that some galaxies were far apart from each other. Others were closer. Others were, like, just touching. So now, wait a minute. Suppose we simulate two galaxies colliding. Oh, what would that look like?

[Chuck Nice]

Galaxy stacks.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And all of a sudden, galaxies were train wrecks. And then these objects in the catalog came to life.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So they weren't a different kind of object. They would just. So, as one of my mentors, Gerard de Vaucouleurs, said, these, you know, a Lexus that's been in an accident is not a different kind of Lexus. It's still a Lexus. Yes, very good. So that was an entire branch of our field that was resolved and burgeoned into a whole understanding of colliding galaxies because of computational astrophysics.

[David Spergel]

I think the history of how stars evolve and the lifetime of stars was really the first big triumph of computational astrophysics. This actually goes back to the 50s and 60s. The very first computers were able to take a star.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The military and scientists had the first.

[David Spergel]

Computers take a star, like the sun.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Spergel]

And the laws of physics, we understood, but they were complicated laws. We couldn't do the full calculations right by hand and evolve them forward and describe what happens, and then that matches the patterns we see in our galaxy.

[Chuck Nice]

There you go.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So this gives you the confidence, right? Yeah, because the laws of physics are everywhere.

[Chuck Nice]

They're going to be the same.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They're going to be the same. So you run it.

[Chuck Nice]

So you run the simulations, they match up, and you're like, okay, we're on to it. We got it.

[David Spergel]

Yeah, that's really cool. So that's the first part is it takes theory and supercharges. It lets you do calculations you couldn't do before.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

A quick add here. One of my colleagues in my department here does computational astrophysics, but he specializes in gas. Like, it's one thing to have a star and a galaxy and this, but.

[Chuck Nice]

Gas, an amorphous gas, which is so much more.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

How do you weird to model that?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right, right. Because it's not discrete objects.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's a continuum of medium. And so that's a whole other thing.

[David Spergel]

It's gas and it's filled with magnetic fields, and there's explosions propagating through it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Shockwave, shock.

[David Spergel]

So it's really rich physics, and we're still struggling to understand it with our simulations. And of course, the other piece is observations.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So, David, what is the latest understanding of the dark matter problem, which has been with us for nearly 100 years?

[David Spergel]

So we don't know what makes up most of our universe.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, that's it. We're done here. You heard it here first.

[David Spergel]

Atoms make up about 4 or 5% of the universe.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And we're made of atoms.

[David Spergel]

And we're made of atoms. Everything we see is made of atoms. Dark matter is five times as much of it. It's something that's there. We sense its gravitational effects.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[David Spergel]

We don't know what it is.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I wanted to lobby to call it dark gravity, because that's what it literally is. Because you don't know if it's matter if you otherwise can't interact with it.

[David Spergel]

We don't know if it's matter. It acts like matter in the sense that when it experiences gravity, it clusters. So we see it cluster in galaxies. We see it behave.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What do you mean is clustering in galaxies? If it's five times the matter we see, it's the galaxies that are clustering in it.

[David Spergel]

It makes up most of the mass of our galaxy. When we see its behavior in different ways it's behaving. It experiences gravity, it falls, it generates gravity, but it also experiences gravity. So that's. Everything's like that.

[Chuck Nice]

The Earth experience gravity, Experience gravity.

[David Spergel]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We can see the Earth.

[David Spergel]

The sun feels us.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Spergel]

This has been the history of science. You know, we felt the gravitational effects of Neptune. We didn't know it. We then went out.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This is very royal. We here, because he's talking about the planet Uranus, we felt the effects of Neptune.

[Chuck Nice]

Uranus felt the effects of Neptune.

[David Spergel]

And we, being astronomers in the 19th century, who did the calculations, realized it was there, saw it, and then Mercury, we also noticed it was experiencing something weird. And in fact, they thought maybe, hey, an idea worked once. Let's try it again. They predicted the existence of the planet Vulcan.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, we've done a whole show on Vulcan, right? We did. We're Vulcan fans here.

[David Spergel]

And it turns out it's not Vulcan. It's general relativity. So we don't know what dark matter. Is it a name we're using to describe some new particle that we haven't seen yet?

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Spergel]

Or is the name that we're using to describe the fact that general relativity is breaking down and we need something beyond that?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Beyond that, we just don't know. So you were not very helpful in this question. I thought you had an answer.

[David Spergel]

What we have learned is what dark matter isn't.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. Oh, that's a start.

[Chuck Nice]

That's a start.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Yeah.

[David Spergel]

So, you know, this is kind of like Sherlock Holmes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So it's not. It's not black holes.

[David Spergel]

It's not black holes.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And I attended a lecture you gave one time, and you also gave evidence that it's not lost socks.

[David Spergel]

It is not lost socks.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[David Spergel]

It is.

[Chuck Nice]

That's good.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

To my drawer, I have, like, four or five socks, but they don't have.

[Chuck Nice]

What's the deal with the one sock? Okay.

[David Spergel]

It is not like bunch of rocks. It's not, you know, we know we've eliminated a whole bunch of things. It's not a massive neutrino. We've just kind of gone working our way through the list of things we know.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, it's good to eliminate, you know.

[David Spergel]

That'S how you figure stuff out.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, exactly.

[David Spergel]

Eliminate possibilities until you figure out what's there.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

As Sherlock Holmes did.

[David Spergel]

Right, exactly. And then dark matter is just the beginning.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Spergel]

There's also dark energy. Energy, which is energy associated with empty space. And it dominates the universe, will determine its fate, and we don't know what it is.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And it means space ain't all that empty.

[David Spergel]

That's right.

[Chuck Nice]

Look at that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So what else has Simon's done with his money?

[David Spergel]

So one of the things we're building in Chile, we just got first light.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And Chile is a country that happens to lay right on the wrong. And, yeah, the Andes Mountain. So in Chile means it's up in the Andes Mountains. Yeah.

[David Spergel]

So it's at 17,000ft.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Ouch.

[Chuck Nice]

Great elevation.

[David Spergel]

Really high dry site where we're studying.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just to be clear, keck is at 14,000ft.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This is higher than the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

[David Spergel]

So we're using that to study the leftover heat for the Big Bang. Ooh, the microwave background.

[Chuck Nice]

Excellent.

[David Spergel]

And we'll be using this to, if we're lucky, we will detect gravitational waves.

[Chuck Nice]

From the very beginning.

[David Spergel]

Yeah. Wow. And learn more about how the universe began.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. But at 70,000ft, no one's breathing any air there. So it's all service observing.

[David Spergel]

No. 17,000. You go up and you bring an oxygen tank.

[Chuck Nice]

Look at that. Everybody up there looks like they're in a nursing home.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. All right.

[David Spergel]

I gotta tell you, so one of the things of being an altitude is you're dumber and you don't know it.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[David Spergel]

So people at altitude, that is when there's.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You have less oxygen because.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, you're oxygen deprived.

[David Spergel]

Oxygen deprived. So you have these things where people are working at the telescope and they're telling you what they're doing because they're communicating with people back at sea level and they're like giving you really stupid suggestions. And you turn to them and say, can you add five and seven for me?

[Chuck Nice]

And they're like, yes.

[David Spergel]

Yeah. And they cupcake. It's like, I think one of us is at altitude. Let's think about this some more.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Took a hit on some oxygen. So it already has first light.

[David Spergel]

So we got first light. We'll be starting to collect data. Start the science run soon.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[David Spergel]

We will be looking for these gravitational waves. We will also measure in much more detail the patterns of polarization and temperature we see in the microwave background. That'll let us determine the age of the universe, its composition to much higher weight.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But you're not a LIGO type arrangement, so you're going to detect a gravitational wave. Is this not the observatory where you're going to look at the wave move across pulsars and see the timing difference?

[David Spergel]

Nope. That's yet another way of seeing gravitational waves.

[Chuck Nice]

Can you imagine that's actually seeing the wave.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, Seeing the wave move from here to there, affecting the data that comes.

[Chuck Nice]

Back from pulsar as opposed to ligo. We detected it wash over.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wash over. But here we're going to watch universe. There's some clever people out there, dude.

[David Spergel]

So what we're doing is we're using the early universe itself as a gravitational wave detector.

[Chuck Nice]

That's amazing.

[David Spergel]

So the gravitational wave comes along, it moved electrons 13.8 billion years ago. Those electrons as they're moving, scatter light in a predicted polarized pattern. And we look out in space, we look back in time. So we're looking back, seeing how gravitational waves move matter around 13.8 billion years ago.

[Chuck Nice]

I don't understand how you cannot love science when you hear this kind of stuff. How can you sit and go, oh, you know, who cares? Like, what is your problem? Okay, that is unbelievable.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So it's a clever way that involves a completely different scheme to detect a gravitational wave than Lyman.

[David Spergel]

It means we're detecting gravitational waves whose wavelengths are comparable to the size of the universe.

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Jeez. Okay.

[David Spergel]

And that lets us know touch of versus beginnings.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

When Chuck, we go, Chuck goes up three octaves. We know. God, he blew a gasket.

[Chuck Nice]

Because it's always so simple. It's like, it's so profoundly and brilliantly simple, but yet, like, beautifully and elegantly complex at the same time. It's unbelievable.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, I think we have enough brain filling for a day.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, that was amazing.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

From aliens to wavelengths the size of the universe. Yeah, I think we're full for a while. When you think of science, of course, you think of scientists sometimes burning the midnight oil or even collaborating, coming up with a new idea, a new observation, a new measurement. And occasionally, if it's really different and groundbreaking, it makes the news. And this is our general understanding of what science is and how it unfolds. However, if you park the curtains somewhere back there, there are agencies, there are organizations, there are funding streams that enable the science in the first place. When I say I'm a NASA scientist, if I were to say that, that means there's money back there voted on by Congress, members of Congress, voted into office by the public, that is the point of origin of the funding that enables it in the first place. And so when you hear about science funding agencies, I want you to think of them as fundamental as the science itself, because without them, there is no science. Yeah, you can be in your garage, I suppose, but lately, not much happens in anybody's garage. Science. The greatest of science that unfolds today are major collaborations with telescopes and particle detectors and collaborations that are not only domestic, but international. And so it's the juxtaposition of those two that makes science move, and that is a cosmic perspective. All right, David, it's a delight, a pleasure. Glad to see you again, Chuck.

[Chuck Nice]

Always good, Always a pleasure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, this is StarTalk. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.

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[Chuck Nice]

Mmm.

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