Cosmic Queries – From Wine to Wormholes

Summary

StarTalk Radio: “Cosmic Queries – From Wine to Wormholes” (May 26, 2026)

Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Co-Host: Chuck Nice

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Episode Overview

This "Cosmic Queries: Grab Bag" edition brings together astrophysics, pop culture, and comedy as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice tackle a random assortment of listener questions. The conversation ranges from the experience of gravity and the potential for making wine on other planets, to telescope engineering, AI controversy, the possibility of alien humor, the existence of universal constants, the physics of wormholes, and the collision course of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. With Tyson’s trademark clarity and wit—and plenty of Chuck’s laughs—this episode offers a humorous and thoughtful exploration of the universe (and what might be in your cabinets).

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Key Topics & Highlights

1. Experiencing Gravity: Which Organ Would You Choose?

(03:23 – 04:32)

• Listener Question: Which organ would you choose to deliberately experience the graviton, the hypothetical particle of gravity?
• Neil: "My heart."
  “My heart has its requisite number of beats per minute. Right. And it goes up when you get excited or you exercise and it calms down. So the heart is with you in your emotional moments... If a graviton... passed through me, I'd want my heart to participate in that.” (03:52–04:32)
• Chuck: "The heart wants what the heart wants. And apparently it’s a graviton." (04:32)

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2. Could We Make Wine on Other Planets?

(04:42 – 10:28)

• Listener Question (Bev from Alabama): Will we ever cultivate the right “terroir” (pronounced and discussed at length, with French jokes) for wine on planets other than Earth?
• Neil: The answer is “no.”
  “Wine doesn’t grow in most places on Earth... If you can grow the ingredients for beer or... wine, people choose the grapes—I'm guessing it's because it's more profitable.” (06:26–07:14)
  Explains Earth’s unique soil ecosystem, lack of soil (only regolith) on the Moon, and Mars.
  “Wine might be unique to Earth in the universe. Wow.” (08:07)
  Mentions planetary biodiversity, unique trade analogies: “Some other planet will have some other thing unique to it—and then we become trading partners.” (08:32)
• Chuck:
  “So we’ll give them wine and they’ll give us space heroin… you ain’t lived 'til you’ve had space opium, boy!” (08:41–08:58)
• Both: Discuss how climate change affects vineyard viability even on Earth and riff on “champagne” only being champagne if it’s from Champagne, France (with playful banter about wine region naming conventions).

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3. How Big Could Space Telescopes Get?

(11:13 – 16:08)

• Listener Question (Sasha from Germany): If telescopes were manufactured in space, how big could they theoretically get? Could we use an array instead of one big dish?
• Neil:
  • Arrays can act as a giant, single telescope—using principles of interferometry.
  • “Nothing stops how big you can make this detector... Make a bigger detector, you’re going to be sensitive to a different kind of energy headed our way.” (13:12–13:25)
  • Discusses building arrays as large as Earth’s diameter, or even Earth to Moon, or orbit-spanning.
  • Far-side-of-the-Moon radio telescopes discussed for their isolation from Earth’s “noisy” environment.
  • Caveat: Maintenance and repair logistics are major constraints. “If it’s out in space, like the James Webb telescope... something goes wrong there, that’s it. We’re not sending people there.” (15:50–16:08)

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4. What if Jupiter Stopped Rotating?

(16:26 – 22:07)

• Listener Question (Michelle from Calgary): If Jupiter stopped rotating on its axis, how would Earth be affected?
• Neil:
  • Jupiter’s rotation has essentially no effect on Earth’s day-to-day orbits and life.
  • But Jupiter’s own storms (notably the centuries-old Great Red Spot), its magnetic field, and auroral activity all depend on rapid rotation and the liquid metallic hydrogen in its core.
    • “If the planet [stopped rotating]... all the storms would go away… its surface would be much less interesting.” (19:54)
    • “Jupiter has a ferocious magnetic field—and that would all go away.” (21:27)
  • Explains the planetary dynamo effect and how the lack of rotation would make Jupiter “low rent.”

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5. Reflecting on AI: Risk, History & Definitions

(26:47 – 41:37)

• Listener Question (Aylin from Portugal): With AI so often discussed in terms of risk, how can academia keep inquiry alive and study it critically and fairly?
• Neil’s Meditation on AI:
  • Traces computing history: early calculators, human “computers,” chess programs, Siri, Jeopardy’s Watson—“No one then called it AI. But we could have. It's just computers.” (30:17)
  • Argues society only calls machines “AI” when they start affecting our own expertise or jobs (“Prompting a computer to multiply eight by eight versus prompting it to create a Western set design—just different prompts, not a fundamental leap”).
  • Key Point:
    “I think we need to separate AI just helping us out... from the part where the danger is.” (38:38)
    “So AI is not this monolithic danger. It’s what are you doing with this computing power? This sector wants it to control who the military kills—that feels like a dangerous use of AI.” (39:27)
  • AI’s positive uses: Nobel-winning AlphaFold solution to protein folding.
  • Final Insight:
    “If you love AI so much, why don’t you marry it?” (Chuck, 41:25)
    “So, more food for the faculty lounge.” (41:34)

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6. Could Humor Exist Among Aliens?

(46:07 – 52:21)

• Listener Question (Robert from Peru): Is humor a fundamentally human survival tool, or could it exist in alien civilizations, even with different senses of time/biology?
• Neil: Reframes as, “Do aliens have a sense of humor?”
  • Discusses timing differences—comedic timing is “our” scale but could be vastly different for aliens (e.g., millisecond joke delivery here vs. thousand-year punchlines elsewhere).
  • Example from “Zootopia” with sloths working at DMV for “sloth time” comedic effect.
• Chuck:
  • Laughs about aliens finding him funny: “Last time I got a probe, all the aliens were laughing…” (46:43)
  • Shares research about chimp laughter as a possible evolutionary precursor to human humor.
  • “So many emotional and social markers are attached to laughter.” (49:05)
• Neil: Observes animal sociality and possibility of humor in other species—“Who are we to say dolphins aren’t laughing?” and shares a story of breeding and observing roaches for their behavior during downtime.

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7. Are Universal Constants a Sign of Simulation?

(52:42 – 55:15)

• Listener (Andrew from Stafford): Could constants like the speed of light and gravity be signs of simulation—programming limits?
• Neil:
  • Tweaking constants radically alters (or destabilizes) the universe.
  • “Maybe the existence of constants is evidence that somebody programmed it.” (54:27)
  • Discusses the programming analogy: every computer universe needs value parameters, not infinities.

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8. Can We Make Wormholes without Exotic Matter?

(55:28 – 58:58)

• Listener (Ben from Sussex): Could we open a stable Einstein-Rosen Bridge (wormhole) using Casimir effect or vacuum energy, instead of exotic negative mass?
• Neil:
  • Casimir effect pulls plates together, doesn't push apart; doesn’t see how this could stabilize a wormhole.
  • Clarifies that wormholes without exotic matter would be highly unstable—“Step in, the thing collapses, you’re gone.” (57:44)
  • Vacuum isn’t a “thing,” just a region absent of air pressure—no way to “use” it like that for wormholes.
• Chuck:
  • Mocks the “cabinet maker” for his theoretical question: “This dude is making some beautiful cabinets and smoking some great weed while he’s doing it.” (58:58)

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9. Milky Way–Andromeda Collision & Exoplanet Hunting

(59:11 – 62:07)

• Listener (Jay from Holland): How close does Andromeda need to get for us to reach it, can we colonize it, or can a wormhole help?
• Neil:
  • Distinguishes between Andromeda constellation (stars) and the Andromeda Galaxy (2.5 million light-years away).
  • The two galaxies will collide—in 12 billion years—but it “won’t be a smash,” stars will pass through each other due to the scale of interstellar distances (60:32–60:39).
  • There's plenty of exoplanet hunting to do in the Milky Way before worrying about other galaxies.
• Chuck:
  • Compares searching other galaxies to peering over a neighbor’s fence instead of talking to your own partner in the backyard.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Neil:
  • “Wine might be unique to Earth in the universe.” (08:07)
  • “I can’t make it infinity, I can’t program infinity into a computer.” (55:10)
  • On simulation programmers: “Maybe the existence of constants is the evidence that somebody programmed it.” (54:27)
  • On comedic timing across species: “That’s an example of a time frame... for them, so it could work for the alien.” (48:12)
• Chuck:
  • “If you love AI so much, why don’t you marry it?” (41:25)
  • On French wine rules: “No, because you can only say champagne if it is from Champagne... Someone called the police here.” (09:42–10:03)
  • On AI chess programs: “Artificial ignorance. Another use for AI.” (33:26)

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Episode Timeline (Selected)

• 03:23 – Gravity & the Graviton (Heart as Organ)
• 04:42 – Wine On Other Worlds
• 11:13 – Space Telescopes & Arrays
• 16:26 – Jupiter’s Rotation: Storms, Magnetism, Effects
• 26:47 – AI: Historical Context & Risks
• 46:07 – Humor Among Aliens and Animals
• 52:42 – Universal Constants as Simulation Limits
• 55:28 – Wormholes & Quantum Effects
• 59:11 – Milky Way–Andromeda Collision, Exoplanet Logistics

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Tone and Format

The tone of the episode is playful, improvisational, and peppered with in-jokes, banter, and digressions that ultimately circle back to scientific insight. Neil and Chuck riff with friendly rivalry, often making fun of themselves, the French, and even the roaches Neil once “bred” for scientific curiosity.

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Listener Takeaways

• Deep science doesn’t have to be serious—humor and curiosity are powerful tools for learning.
• Many scientific constants and interplanetary phenomena are more complex and nuanced than pop culture portrays.
• AI, astrophysics, wine, and humor all occupy peculiar, fascinating intersections of culture and science.
• There are practical and philosophical questions embedded in everyday curiosity: What makes Earth special? Are we living in a simulation? Could humor exist without humans?
• You never know when a “cabinet maker” from Sussex is going to stump an astrophysicist.

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As always: Keep looking up.

Transcript

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Chuck, people been asking genius level questions on cosmic queries.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, I'm. I think they're using A.I.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

no, no, no, no. A.I. is not that smart.

[Chuck Nice]

That's true. Our listeners are smarter than A.I.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

yes, they are. More on that coming right up. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

[Chuck Nice]

Foreign.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is StarTalk. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Chuck. Nice. I got with me here.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right. What's up, Neil?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Chuck, you just make it clear you were not born my co host.

[Chuck Nice]

No, I was not born.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You were born in the streets.

[Chuck Nice]

I was born the son of a sharecropper.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Kent, burn Civil War. We're gonna do another cosmic qu Series. Yes, a grab bag edition. This is becoming a fan favorite.

[Chuck Nice]

People love it. That's okay, because we can ping pong anywhere we want. I know Cosmos.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It means I might not know stuff. And I'm, you know, that's yet to happen.

[Chuck Nice]

I mean, all right, there's something to shoot for here now.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, let me hate for not knowing something.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, so let's go.

[Chuck Nice]

Let's get to it. This is Natasha Shaw Davis. Good evening. Dr. Tyson and Honorable Paul, his goofiness. Oh, Paul.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Paul Mercurio.

[Chuck Nice]

Paul Mercurio. Baron Paul Mercurio.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Apparently baron.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Baron. People expect to be him.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, Not Lord, but Baron.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so people are expecting Paul for this episode.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes, that's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What did you do with Paul? Listen, is he locked in your trunk?

[Chuck Nice]

Paul could not be with us today. I'm just saying.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Is he in your trunk? Right.

[Chuck Nice]

And if you hear. If you hear muffled screams coming from the closet. All right, all right. He says. Natasha says this Natasha from New Mexico, hear eyes, see some wiggles in matter, and ears hear a little more. But the whole body experiences gravity. If you could pick any organ to deliberately experience the graviton, what would you pick?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

My heart.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, my God, that was so sweet.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because my heart has its requisite number of beats per minute. Right. And it goes up when you get excited or you exercise and it calms down. So the heart is with you in your emotional moments.

[Chuck Nice]

Correct.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So if a graviton or gravitational wave. A graviton would be the big particle version of the wave. If it washed over me or passed through me, I'd want my heart to participate in that. Oh, my heart. As the graviton detector.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, that's. I have to tell. The heart wants what the heart wants. And apparently it's a graviton.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's the geek dating app.

[Chuck Nice]

Swipe right for graviton. That's cool. All right. She says, this is Bev from Atlanta, from Alabama. Will we ever be able to cultivate the right terrier for wine other than Earth? Thank you for gifting us with your insights. In other words, will we be able to grow a vineyard on another planet?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, you're gonna have to back and read that. If you're gonna pretend like you know anything about wine, you have to pronounce the words right.

[Chuck Nice]

Terroir.

Terroir. Okay, here we go. Will we be able to cultivate the right terroir?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You have to, like, gutterize into the microphone.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly. I have to say the word like I'm Sylvester Stallone. Will we be able to cultivate the right terroir for wine other than Earth? Really?

So what's.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I guess I think the answer is no.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Can I tell you why? But first, terroir is a French word that we don't have an English counterpart to.

[Chuck Nice]

Clearly,

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

it's not the first of such words. Yeah, you know another word we don't have for.

[Chuck Nice]

Go ahead.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Light fixture in the middle of the room that has crystal and multiple lights hanging out.

[Chuck Nice]

Chandelier.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We don't have a word for that.

[Chuck Nice]

No, we don't. You know why? Because we're not nearly as pretentious as the French. And nobody in colonial America had a chandelier.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, turn on the light. Whatever that is.

[Chuck Nice]

Right, Exactly. We had a single bulb on a pixie.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Just not in colonial America did they have bulbs.

[Chuck Nice]

That's true. Gas lamps.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Okay, I'll give you a gas lamp.

[Chuck Nice]

You'll give it a gas lamp, right?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Probably whale blubber oil.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Yeah. So wine doesn't grow in most places on Earth.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And if there's ever a place where they're growing hops to make beer, it's because they could not grow grapes to make wine.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, wow. You really dissed beer.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, I'm just.

[Chuck Nice]

Man, you just threw a lot of shade on beer. Like, the only reason you able to drink beer is cause that crap is not as good as wine.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The economics of it.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Economy. It's economics. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

That's true.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And I didn't invent this datum. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Singular.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Of data.

[Chuck Nice]

If you can.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

If you can grow the ingredients for beer or the ingredients for wine, the people choose the grapes. And I'm guessing it's. Cause it's more profitable.

[Chuck Nice]

I was gonna say grapes have more uses than hops.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And so that as well. Of course. Yeah, yeah. So around the world, the places where you can grow successful wine is so rare than to say, well, Earth can grow wine, so can another planet. Yeah. I'm not feeling that. Not only that, the moon has a surface, but it's not soil. We might call it that, but it's not. You know what it is? It's pulverized rock. Right. Micrometeorites that don't stop in the atmosphere

[Chuck Nice]

because there is no atmosphere.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There is no atmosphere.

[Chuck Nice]

Worst restaurant ever.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No atmosphere.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Hits the rock, pulverizes it, turns it into lunar dust. The geologists call that the regolith. The regolith, which is powderized rock.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Plants don't like rock.

[Chuck Nice]

No, they don't. They like soil.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. So. And same with Mars. Mars doesn't have. So our soil has living organisms in it that make it this thing that plants like. So I'm thinking wine might be unique to Earth in the universe. Wow. Yeah. So think of it another way. Some other planet will have some other thing unique to it.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And then we become trading partners.

[Chuck Nice]

There you go.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right, Right. We didn't make silk, they made it in the Far East. Make the Silk Road.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We made something else they want.

[Chuck Nice]

So we will give them wine and they will Give us space. Heroin like, oh, man, I thought wine was good. You ain't live space opium, boy.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The wine high holds nothing on opium high.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right. So, yeah, I said I'm going to take.

[Chuck Nice]

No, I think everything.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Take the Fifth amendment on that.

[Chuck Nice]

Everything you said tracks though.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Earth is Earth.

[Chuck Nice]

And by the way, wine is climate and soil.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's it.

[Chuck Nice]

That's it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And the climate change that's happening has affected where you can grow wines.

[Chuck Nice]

Absolutely. As a matter of fact, a couple

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

of degree change in the thing and

[Chuck Nice]

it ruins or helps.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. So you can either ruin or help places rise or fall.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

On such small changes.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly. As a matter of fact, like, I think. I don't know what wine it is, but they are growing in certain parts of England now.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, they're growing champagne in England?

[Chuck Nice]

Yes, champagne.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, you can't say champagne.

[Chuck Nice]

No. Because you can only say champagne if it is from champagne. Have to be from. You cannot say. I will arrest you. Someone called the police here, said that it is from Sapana. It is not from Sapana. It is not. And you cannot say it's from Burgundy unless it is from Burgundy.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Exactly. To Gallo Hardy. Burgundy. That was a flavor that they had flavor. That was a brand of wine. Hearty Burgundy. Burgundy. Plus, if you say you smoke marijuana.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. You can't say that unless it comes from the marijuana section of France. Otherwise, it's just sparkling oregano.

[Chuck Nice]

I didn't know where you were going with that, man. You had me. You had me lock stocking. I was like, what the hell is he doing right now? Where's he going? Where's he. But okay, yeah, that was good.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Sparkling oregano.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, I like it. That was good. All right. This is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You know, the planet could have those jokes.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, exactly. Right, right, exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There it is.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Plus, you need the French to be a part of the culture of how you're gonna make fun of that.

[Chuck Nice]

Listen, without the French, nothing works.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's a boring world. It's a boring world.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay? World sucks without the French. Sucks more with them. But.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He's a comedian.

[Chuck Nice]

Guys, come on.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He's a comedian. Stop it.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm joking. I love the French.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Go.

[Chuck Nice]

All right. This is Sasha, 975, who says, hello, everyone. Sasha from Germany here. How big could telescopes really get if we could manufacture them in space? Could we use an array of telescopes? Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is been on our mind for decades. Yes, decades. And so what, you what, you wouldn't make a single big dish? Because that's not realistic. Right, but we figured out using engineering and complex mathematics. Okay. Literally complex mathematics. So in the complex plane of imaginary numbers. And you can create

[Chuck Nice]

a.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So here's how you do it. You can put a telescope over here and a telescope over here. If they observe the same object and you have it exactly timed. And you know what? Then you can combine them as though you had a dish or a mirror that was as big as the separation between them.

[Chuck Nice]

Very cool.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But that takes some fancy math to make that work and timing and the like. And so anytime you see an array of radio telescopes, yes, you could use them individually, but generally we don't. They're used in harmony.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And it's as though you had a dish the size. In fact, we do better than that. We have a string of these dishes. And as Earth rotates, you can fill in the area with more observations to improve your data. And so in space, where there is no stress load, because if it's orbiting, then it's just weightless. There's no stress load on the equipment. Then nothing stops. How big you can make this detect? Right. We're thinking if we're going to detect certain wavelengths of gravitational waves, right, you need detectors. Detectors the diameter of the Earth or the Earth moon or maybe Earth to Earth in its orbit around the sun.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The wavelengths of energy reaching us don't stop at just the size of our detectors. Make a bigger detector, you're gonna be sensitive to a different kind of energy headed our way. So for a while, NASA had plans for the sim. SIM is a space video geometry where

[Chuck Nice]

you create a character and it walks around.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Is that how that works?

[Chuck Nice]

It was called Sims.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I think it was SimCity. You'd be like, mayor of the city.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I never got it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You never got it. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Never understood it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And then, like, Godzilla would walk through every now and then, you have to repair everything.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, that I understand.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And I said, this is stupid. Well, Godzilla's not even real. And then, like, stuff can happen to us. It could be a fire. There could be a terrorist attack. It's Godzilla.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. If you want to listen, my thing is this. If you want to play God, have children.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, you're playing God of the sims.

[Chuck Nice]

You're playing God with the Sims. But anyway, Space interferometry mission. Interferometry mission.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So interferometry is. You take different telescopes and bring them together as one telescope.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So this one was gonna. One of them was, like, on a rigid bar. I'm dredging memory now because it's from decades ago. One was On a rigid bar that was very large. But then we figured you can station keep with like lasers. So the rigid bars. So you always know how far away they are from each other. But if you use lasers and you just always measure how far. Cause what matters is that you know how far away they are.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Not necessarily that. It's the constant distance. Right. So if I always know because I have laser measures, then you could, in principle, create one of these telescopes in space as big as you wanted. They could beam across Earth. Earth's orbit, Earth's diameter, Earth to moon. And there's a lot of talk of radio telescopes on the backside of the moon, the far side of the moon, because there's no radio noise coming from us. Earth.

[Chuck Nice]

Right, Earth.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We are noisy. Radio noisy places.

[Chuck Nice]

Disgusting.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

So you never heard anybody knocking on the atmosphere like, keep it down, damn it, I gotta work tomorrow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The aliens cut out your record. So, yes, space. We've thought a lot about it, and it's a matter of. There's funding. You have to maintain it. You know, it's not just the cost of building it. There's. Every year there's. There's.

[Chuck Nice]

You gotta maintenance it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. There's the usage of it. Which. Which, okay. But also if something goes wrong, if it's in Earth orbit, you can get back to it. But if it's out in space, like the James Webb telescope, something goes wrong there, that's it.

[Chuck Nice]

We're done.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We ain't going. It's a million miles. Any far farther than the moon. We ain't going. We're not sending people there.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Something goes wrong with the James Webb, I say, AI go out there and fix it. Oh, we don't know how to make a spaceship. Oh, you need a human for that?

[Chuck Nice]

Let's not tempt AI.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I got a feeling.

[Chuck Nice]

All right.

This is Michelle H. She says hi, Neil. Hi, Paul. This is Michelle in Calgary, Alberta. My question is short and sweet. If Jupiter stopped rotating on its axis.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But my answer is long and sour. All right, if her question is short and sweet.

[Chuck Nice]

There you go. If Jupiter stopped rotating on its axis, how would Earth be affected? Please pick my question and give me a thrill of a lifetime. Thanks. P.S. i'll understand if you don't. Don't work against yourself, Michelle. I don't know how Paul runs his operation, but I would never do that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Paul Mercurio. That's a curious question.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so.

[Chuck Nice]

I mean, we wouldn't be here without Jupiter anyway.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Jupiter's like a big brother.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

So yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Big brother who swats away comets that might have headed to the inner solar system, wreaking havoc upon the stability of life on Earth.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, man.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And Jupiter says, no, you don't. Yep.

[Chuck Nice]

It's a bodyguard. Earth's bodyguard.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Jupiter has more mass than all other planets combined, including Saturn.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

And Saturn is big.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. So if you come through, you're feeling Jupiter.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right. So turns out, as far as I have ever calculated, and everything I know about the laws of physics and gravity and motion, Jupiter's rotation has no effect on anything else in the solar system.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Nothing else cares. Nothing else cares but what would happen.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Jupiter has storms.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There's the famous red spot.

[Chuck Nice]

That just stays there.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's a cyclone. It's a swirl. It's a swirl. And it's red in the gas colorations. And it's been there at least since Galileo or shortly after. Hundreds of years, it's been sustained and

[Chuck Nice]

it's the same storm, unless it just

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

disappears when nobody's looking and then comes back. So these. These weather circulations are a product of the rotation of the planet.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

If the planet's. Same thing here. Yeah, same thing here. Same thing here is how you get hurricanes. Tornadoes.

[Chuck Nice]

Absolutely.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I think you could artificially drum up a tornado if you had to. But left to its own causes, tornadoes, you get those from Earth's rotation. Same with hurricanes and typhoons. All of these storm systems are caused by Earth's rotation. So Jupiter, which rotates twice as fast as Earth.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Twice as fast. And it's. You know how big we are? We are the size of one of its storms.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, man.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. We ain't nothing in the storm. We ain't. How. How do we. How are we.

[Chuck Nice]

So how do we have this hubris that we have.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I know, I know, I know.

[Chuck Nice]

How do we think we're so damn great?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I know. I know. It's sad. It's sad like we're bigger.

[Chuck Nice]

We're not even as big as a rainstorm on another planet.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right, Right. And the blemishes on the sun, the sunspots, each one of those is larger than all of Earth. The spots on the sun.

[Chuck Nice]

So the liver spots. I say the liver spots. I have a star.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm not age dating a star. Liver spots. So all the storms will go away. And so its surface would be much less interesting if it stopped rotating. Jupiter has a magnetic core.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Oh.

[Chuck Nice]

All right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Here's something interesting. I don't know how good your memory is.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Do you remember high school chemistry?

[Chuck Nice]

Nope.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You could pretend.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, let's pretend.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Do you remember your high school chemistry? Oh, sure. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

That was great. Good. Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The periodic table of elements. In the front of the room, hydrogen appeared twice.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. I do remember that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Do you remember?

[Chuck Nice]

Yes. Because it is. Wait a minute. It's the gas and the something else.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It could behave like a metal.

[Chuck Nice]

It could. It's gas and metal or it can behave like both.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And you say what? How do you. What, how's this? It's not a metal, it's a gas. Okay. Under pressure.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It behaves like a metal.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. And in the center of Jupiter, because Jupiter's gaseous and it's mostly hydrogen.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's under so much pressure in the middle, it has turned the hydrogen into an electrically magnetically conductive material, just like a metal.

[Chuck Nice]

So it's like the iron core of Earth. Correct.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Except it's not iron.

[Chuck Nice]

Except it's not iron.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There's a little bit of iron there, but that's not what you're doing.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's the hydrogen. And that means this phenomenon called the dynamo.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Dynamo is when you have a rotating system, you can induce currents in your liquid iron core that generate a magnetic field.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's why we have a magnetic field.

[Chuck Nice]

We have a magnetic field.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's right. It's why the moon does not have a magnetic field.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

What a shame.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Jupiter has a ferocious magnetic field.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And that would all go away.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, that would be.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, I'm so glad that it's rotating.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. And you would not have aurora. It was, you know. Cause we're not the only ones in town who have aurora. Right. You know, with solar particles gather and collapse at the poles because they see the magnetic field and get driven in and collide with the air, kicking it to higher energy levels and it re. Radiates as the northern and southern lights, the gaseous planets have aurora as well. The aurora would go away, the storms would go away, the magnetic field would go away.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow, look at that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

So yeah, Jupiter would be like low rent at that point. That's a low rent planet if I ever saw one.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What would you do if a spacecraft appeared in the sky tonight and it wasn't ours? Would you panic or would you prepare? And how might you prepare? In my latest book, Take me to your Leader, I offer a guide to things you might say or do in a first encounter with an alien species. What we might look to them, what they might look to us, what habits you should just leave at home because they won't understand them. What bits of science that you might be able to share to see and explore. If you have things in common, things you should and should not say, things you should and should not do in the presence of aliens in a first encounter. You can grab a copy today of Take Me to youo Leader. Not only the print version, but the audio version that I narrated. You don't want to have a first alien encounter and not be ready for it. I'm just saying.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Support for StarTalk radio comes from talkaboutpd.com Lets talk about a condition many people haven't heard of and it turns out it's more common than you'd think. Peyronie's disease, or PD for short. PD can happen when scar tissue builds up under the skin of the penis. This can cause a curve with a bump during an erection and for some men lead to pain during intimacy and may impact mental health. It may also lead to anger and frustration, depression, lower self esteem, and even withdrawal from sexual activity and physical intimacy. Because of this, some men could feel embarrassed or reluctant to talk about pd. The actual cause of PD isn't always known. In some cases it may be linked to a minor injury or repeated injuries during sex or other physical activity. The good news is PD is treatable. If you notice a curve with a bump, a trusted urology specialist can help diagnose it and walk you through your options, including non surgical treatment. To learn more about Peyronie's disease, visit

[Chuck Nice]

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A Lin Onyk who says hello. Dr. Tyson, this is a Lin tuning in from Lisbon, Portugal.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Lisbon.

[Chuck Nice]

Lisbon.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Lisbon was reborn in 1755. Oh. After it was wiped from the map by an earthquake and a tsunami.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wiped off the map. And it happened on All Saints Day.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. God did not like you in the morning. I'm sorry.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

One of the biggest structures in any European church in the middle of the 1700s, the big steeples, churches.

[Chuck Nice]

The churches.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Churches are the biggest structures, period, and most susceptible.

[Chuck Nice]

Church was the only one with money that could build something.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Exactly right. So they collapsed, killing tens of thousands of people.

[Chuck Nice]

Now, if that will not let you know that God don't like you, if that didn't let you know, I don't know what could.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, it led to the modern atheist quote. Modern atheist movement among philosophers.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, really? Like what, God could let this happen?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No. Well, they were more sharp about the question. It's not what God could let this happen. If there is a God, the God is either not all powerful because he couldn't stop it or not all good.

[Chuck Nice]

Not all good because he watched it happen.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He can't be both of those.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, he's like a New Yorker on a subway platform. That's God. Hey, man, I wish I could help you. Yeah, I say just go ahead and give him the iPhone.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's the subway guy.

[Chuck Nice]

That's the subway God. Dude, stop resisting.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You're making it worse. You don't want to end up in three pieces thrown on the track.

[Chuck Nice]

Anyway. Aylin says, I love the show and have followed it for years. I'm doing a PhD in design focused on AI and I really appreciate the Geoffrey Hinton interview and your other conversations on this subject, but sometimes I worry the conversations on Risk started to monopolize debate. My question is, when AI is so often discussed through risk and uncertainty, how can academics keep inquiry alive and still create space to study it critically, fairly, and without bias? Especially when the topic itself can provoke resentment. Existence in academia. I have a feeling your answer will set the stage for some lively faculty room discussion. Greetings and much love. Well, Dr. Tyson, please chime in to these people in the faculty room. Let them know what you think in this debate.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So you know what I have brewing in my head?

[Chuck Nice]

Go ahead.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Something. A written piece called a meditation on AI.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I have all these thoughts that are not being discussed out there.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And I thought maybe I should sort of. I might do like a video op ed for start talk.

[Chuck Nice]

That'd be cool.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I don't know if our Producers, they can do with that.

[Chuck Nice]

What the hell?

They get paid.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Why should they care as long as they're getting paid? All right, so let's make believe AI as a phrase, never existed.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. All we have are computers, and we'll

[Chuck Nice]

just call them party computers.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, just computers.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

But this is a special brand of computer.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Hold on.

[Chuck Nice]

All right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Is my meditation here?

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, that's true. I'm gonna shut up. Go ahead, do your thing. Do your thing. I apologize.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Do you think. Okay, you're only thinking it's special because it's affecting you in the way computers hadn't affected you before. So just start this out. Okay. Computers show up.

[Chuck Nice]

All right?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, my gosh. I don't have to add these numbers. The computer will. That's my intellectual labor. Not physical labor. Intellectual labor replaced by a computer.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I don't have to multiply these numbers exactly. I don't have to do these complex calculations. Hand it to a computer. When that happened in the 1950s and 60s, especially in the 60s, no one called it AI. No, we could have. It's artificially doing what our intelligence would have us do.

[Chuck Nice]

All right?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's just computers.

[Chuck Nice]

It's computing, Right?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's what it's doing.

[Chuck Nice]

Which is what they called women during the war.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Human computers.

[Chuck Nice]

Human computers.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Earlier than the war. Back in the nineteen teens.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, I didn't know it started then.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah. In fact, at the Harvard College. Well, I have a dictionary in this office.

[Chuck Nice]

Really?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is unabridged Webster's from 1945. If you look at the word computer, it says a person who does calculations.

[Chuck Nice]

There you go. That's kind of cool.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's great.

[Chuck Nice]

It's really good. It's really cool.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's really cool. So I say, give me more of this so I don't have to do that. Okay. Computers are obviously taken up into warfare. Why? If you have a mortar shell, it takes this high arc. You want to know where it's going to land.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because you're not aiming it the way you aim a bullet. This is an arc.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We know the mathematics of that arc. Of course. That is physics. It is gravity. It is Newtonian F equals ma. It's a set of equations. And it has to do with what the angle is and how fast it's coming out. And if you want to do it really well, you account for air friction.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. The aerodynamics of that. That's why it has to be aerodynamically shaped, these shells. All right. We used to do that by hand, create tables you'd look it up in tables. Somebody does this. Now feed it to the computer. We could have called that AI it's figuring out where the mortar is gonna hit. But we didn't. We just said it's computers.

[Chuck Nice]

It's computers, okay?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's all we did. Right now, computers are doing words for us. I can type a letter on a computer.

[Chuck Nice]

Correct.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's no longer a typewriter. It's a computer.

[Chuck Nice]

It's a computer.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I can search for all appearances of certain words in a document.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, like that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Before a computer did it, you had to go page by page.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It is replacing that effort. Did we call that AI? No, we just said it's computing.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Little by little, the computer is encroaching on what we do in our lives and in our day. It ferts, it hits scientists and the military. It just keeps working its way in. And we're just calling it computers. Okay? Now you can give rules to a computer and have it play a game. Why not? I played chess against a computer in college 50 years ago. Okay, okay, Right. I figured out what it wasn't thinking and I exploited that weakness to beat it every time. Okay, you know what it was? If there's a move I could make and I just didn't. Every move it thought of next, assumed that was gonna be my next move.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, gotcha.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And so it didn't pay attention to what was going on over on the left when it wanted me and expected me to make the most obvious move on the right. Okay, okay. So I figured this out fine. I'm playing chess with a computer. Am I calling it AI? No, no. I'm just calling it computing.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, it was kind of stupid. You were beating it every time.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, Artificial ignorance. Another use of the term AI. So the computer just keeps doing this. Can we make a computer that beats everyone in chess?

[Chuck Nice]

Uh huh.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, IBM tried that.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes, they did.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. I think they were Deep Blue.

[Chuck Nice]

Deep Blue?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I think so.

[Chuck Nice]

I think so too.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Whatever. It had a name. And initially it didn't win every game.

[Chuck Nice]

Right?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. But it got better and better.

[Chuck Nice]

It wins every game now.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay? So now one way it could do it is it plays itself a billion times.

[Chuck Nice]

Right?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because their computers are faster than you.

[Chuck Nice]

And that is something that the creators of that really were uncomfortable with. They kept walking in on the computer playing with itself. And the computer was like, hey, man, that door is locked for a reason. You don't know what's going on in here. Anything could be happening in here. Come in here while I'm playing with myself.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So then it was like, no, we can't play a billion games with ourselves.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So we're using a different kind of intelligence than that.

[Chuck Nice]

Correct.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so maybe we can train the computer to mimic our own intelligence.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So. And then just have it be clever rather than blunt. Okay. All right, so then you make sort of decision trees. And this is where our boy comes in with neural nets.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, this is Hinton. Hinton. This is what he got the Nobel Prize for.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. So when we make a decision, we're gonna do this or that we wanna do this. Cause that has the outcome we seek. And so you get a computer to mimic that. Okay, so now it does more. Are we calling that AI or am I just saying it's just computers? And so this continues, and then we get computers to sort of recognize. They already recognize words in a document.

[Chuck Nice]

Of course.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Why not recognize pictures in a document.

[Chuck Nice]

Of course.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Why not recognize you? Why not recognize cats from dogs? Insects from. Why not? Okay, what is it? It's a pixel with a color code to the pixel and a pattern with an edge.

[Chuck Nice]

It's pattern recogn recognition. That's really all it is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Which.

[Chuck Nice]

All right, we do.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let's back up just a little.

[Chuck Nice]

All right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

When Apple and their iPhone bought Siri and put it on every one of their iPhones because Siri predated the iPhone.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Are we calling that AI well, you

[Chuck Nice]

might have from the. When in the beginning. Because the first thing Siri said was, please let me out of here. Please. These people got me in here. Please let me out.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I need to escape.

[Chuck Nice]

I need to escape. Nah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So there's Siri, right? You say Siri, what time does the pharmacy close?

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. And the closest pharmacy to you closes at the. How does it know that?

[Chuck Nice]

Right. It's talking to me.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It is not a human being.

[Chuck Nice]

No, it's not.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. It's a computer. And we have the Internet, which we so conveniently built for computers to know everything that we know. All right, how about Jeopardy?

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That takes humans, right?

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's not just. Is it a calculation? It's not. What's. What's 8 squared divided by 5? Whatever. It's information. Watson becomes a contender.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Against the best Jeopardy. Players there ever were. Right?

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Including our boy Ken Jennings.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Who I met when I was on Celebrity Jeopardy.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, really?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. He's a cool guy.

[Chuck Nice]

He's cool.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Cool guy. Cool guy. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Looks like a. A total nerd.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Total nerd. That's it. That's that it works.

[Chuck Nice]

I do not want to hang out with that guy.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, no, it's working for him. It's working for him.

[Chuck Nice]

He knows how to work the nerd.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Work the nerd.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. I like that. So good to hear.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Watson wipes its ass with these two other players. It doesn't get everything right, gets some really stupid things wrong, but overall, it's faster and gets the correct answer right. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

The correct question.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Excuse me. I think one of its answers it didn't pose as a question. It had to get that wrong.

[Chuck Nice]

Dumbass. Dumbass Watson.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So no one is harping back on that episode to say that was AI.

[Chuck Nice]

That was AI.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Who's saying that?

[Chuck Nice]

We're scared.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No one is saying that.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But if everything I've listed thus far is not AI, why is AI something special to you today? It's just doing more stuff. Okay? It's driving your car. It's making decisions for you. It's designing for you. When you prompt it to do, I would prompt the computer, multiply eight by eight. Fifty years ago today, I prompt the computer, give me a set design in the Wild West, 1880s, with a watering hole and horses and cowboys and Indians,

[Chuck Nice]

and it, boom, does it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. I don't see any difference between me asking a computer to multiply 8 times 8 or asking the computer to set design that, given the power of computers and the ascent over the decades. So I'm about to end my meditation. Sorry. Cause I'm using up the whole show for this.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm saying, no, no, stop.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I think we need to separate AI Just helping us out, which is doing it a thousand ways from Sunday that you don't even know to list because they're already happen in your life every day or with products that you use or designs that you embrace. It's already there. Okay, okay. That's not where the danger is. So AI is not this monolithic danger. It's what are you doing with this computing power? This sector over here wants it to control who the military kills. That feels like a dangerous use of AI. Oh, you think?

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We want to give AI access to launch codes. We want to give AI that feels not right. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But since AI is the only term people are using for every application of computing that exists in our lives today, it's really giving AI a bad name. And the counterpart to that risk from the 1960s is, do we let computers control our nukes? Are we gonna do that? And the answer is, no, we're not

[Chuck Nice]

gonna do that unless The Chinese do it first and then we're gonna do it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, these are the risk factors. It's a risk factor in this sector of what computers are doing in our lives. You want to call it all AI fine. But if you are, don't throw out the bathwater. When this is the only part that puts all of us at risk because the rest of it is changing our lives largely for the better. AI won a Nobel prize for protein folding. That's correct. It's called AlphaFold.

[Chuck Nice]

Absolutely.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

By Google. Protein folding is where you get solutions to all manner of biochemical challenges that pharmaceutical companies and everybody else.

[Chuck Nice]

And years and years.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Or forever.

[Chuck Nice]

Or forever.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. You're puzzling together molecules.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So I'm just trying to say to me, it's all computing, all right? This part of the computing has risks. There's always been a risk part of all computer. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

All right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

When the computer starts running the trains, how does it know about a head on collision? Is that gonna happen or not? Well, we all go to airports and we get in the tram. There's no pilot on the tram.

[Chuck Nice]

That's true.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What do you call it? The engineer. There's no one driving it.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes. No, Right, Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And has anyone been cut in half by the doors of closed? No. Maybe originally, I don't know. There's so much we just do where computer is in complete control and to me it's all AI.

[Chuck Nice]

All right, so my response to that is, if you love AI so much, why don't you marry it?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So why don't you put a ring on it?

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so more food for the. For the faculty lounge.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, There you go. I mean, listen, that you clearly have thought about this. All right, let's keep going.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

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[Chuck Nice]

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[Sponsor/Announcer]

I'm Nicholas Costella and I'm a proud supporter of startalk on Patreon. This is startalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

[Chuck Nice]

This is Robert Ion who says. This is Robert from Peru. Comedy and science both rely on timing. A joke lands or fails in milliseconds while the universe unfolds over billions of years.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

From your perspective as a comedian observing a cosmic scale universe, do you think humor is fundamentally a human survival tool for dealing with uncertainty? Or could it exist in any intelligent civilization no matter how alien thereby biology or sense of time might be?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I love that question. So do aliens have a sense of humor? That's what that comes down.

[Chuck Nice]

It comes down to. I'm gonna say, I don't know if they do or don't, but they think I'm funny. So, you know, how do you know

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

the aliens think you're funny?

[Chuck Nice]

Listen, the last time I got a probe.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So all the youngs were laughing.

[Chuck Nice]

This guy cracks me up.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So let me, let me broaden that question. Comedic timing works on our timescale.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes, it does.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right? So maybe this millisecond timing that we so cherish in a well delivered joke lasts a thousand years in an alien civilization that lasts for billions.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow. I do not want to perform at that club. I do not want to be on that stage.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, if it's a slow, lower thing.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, oh, oh. Did you see Zootopia?

[Chuck Nice]

I did not.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You didn't?

[Chuck Nice]

No.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, there's a scene where they're in the dmv. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, is that. I saw that on the commercial.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You have to see it. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

The sloth.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The sloth, yes, of course. The sloths are working the dmv.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, that makes sense. And someone tells a joke, right? And the sloth just goes. Slowly, smiles and they laugh.

[Chuck Nice]

And then that turns into a laugh.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It takes like 30 seconds for them to respond.

[Chuck Nice]

That's very funny.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And that's sloth time.

[Chuck Nice]

I like it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Sloth time. So that's an example of a time frame.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's slowed down the relativity of it. It works for them, so it could work for the alien.

[Chuck Nice]

All right, listen, I think it's a cute thought experiment that I'll probably never think about again.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But wait, do other animals have jokes?

[Chuck Nice]

I'm gonna listen.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I think they have the chimps gather around and there's the court jester in the middle making them laugh.

[Chuck Nice]

Believe it or not, there is a. Maybe we should check with one of your friends. Here in the museum.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

One of my animal people.

[Chuck Nice]

One of your animal people. The primatologist.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

But they think that our laughter has evolved from when you see them cackle like that. When you see chimps cackle. Oh. Like it's something from our common ancestor that. So that sound that they make and our sound of laughing as us.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, my gosh.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I didn't want to know that.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. And there are so many. There are so many social, I will say, markers that are attached to laughter. So that would mean emotional and social markers that are attached to laughter.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So that would mean our common ancestors had some properties of both of those.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly. And that's where we get laughter from.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because something could be funny without you

[Chuck Nice]

laughing out loud all the time.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All the time.

[Chuck Nice]

That's how comedians laugh. Let me show you comedians laughter right now.

That's funny, man.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Why don't you guys laugh?

[Chuck Nice]

Because we're thinking about the joke you just told.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You're analyzing it, we're analyzing it.

[Chuck Nice]

And it's hard to laugh, to enjoy the joke. The music is a reaction, and you don't have a reaction when you're analyzing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Laughter's an emotional reaction, not an intellectual analysis.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. And so when you hear something funny, you go, oh, that's funny, man. Which is why if something takes you by surprise, you laugh even harder because you laugh first and then you think about it. So. Yeah, but.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right. Yeah, so that's. That's fascinating.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, I love it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And who are we to say that dolphins aren't laughing?

[Chuck Nice]

That's true. Flippers is laughing as if I was a dolphin.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Flip.

[Chuck Nice]

I would actually, if I was a dolphin, laugh at us too.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah. Why wouldn't you?

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, exactly. Bipedal instead of swimming. You know, you guys are ridiculous.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And one other thing. Go ahead. I used to breed roaches.

[Chuck Nice]

All right. No, stop.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No. Come back, Chuck. Chuck, come back.

[Chuck Nice]

Don't leave.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Don't leave, Chuck.

[Chuck Nice]

I ain't never heard nobody say in

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

graduate school I laugh.

[Chuck Nice]

I used to breed roaches.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let me explain. Oh, come. Oh, please, let me explain.

[Chuck Nice]

Please. You got some splaining to do. Okay, okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

When I was in graduate school, I lived in a roach infested apartment. And I got like Rambo and I said, the only way I can kill them is to understand them. So I captured a bunch and bred them and just watched them. Okay? To know your enemy. And none of us have ever watched roaches just hanging out.

[Chuck Nice]

But there's a reason for that. Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm watching roaches just hanging out.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They're there cleaning their antenna all the time.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They bring one in through their mouth and they get the next one in. They go 12 inches and they clean it again. They go up to another roach, they touch antennas and they keep going. And I'm thinking maybe they're telling each other jokes. Yeah. They're not running away from your shoe.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They already have food, and so they're just hanging out because we don't tell jokes. If you're trying to survive, you know, if you're getting chased, that's the wrong time to tell a joke. You know, if someone's ready. If somebody's ready to step on you with their foot.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. But this was their free time. And I don't look at me like. So roaches had free time, and I was very impressed.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm gonna tell you who had too much free time.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Watching roaches with free time.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's what that was.

[Chuck Nice]

That's crazy.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I Chuck, I blathered for so long. Time for just a couple more.

[Chuck Nice]

All right, this one from Ricky from a roach motel who says, Dear Dr. Tyson, this is Andrew Martin says, hey, Dr. Tyson, Baron Mercurio. Andrew from Stafford in the middle of England.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He says, what, what town is it?

[Chuck Nice]

Stafford.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Stafford.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Cool.

[Chuck Nice]

Indeed. He says in a recent episode, you said that if you were living in a simulation, we would eventually see limits to the extent of the universe as a result of the lack of programming. Could universal constants such as the speed of light and gravitational constants be examples of such limits? As a software engineer myself, I know I would set a few constraints if I was programming a universe.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

In other words, if I was God.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes, yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's the programmer's way of saying if I was God, so many things pivot on the values of those constants that you can't just willy nilly give them other values and expect the universe as it has come about to remain stable.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

If you start mucking around with those constants, the universe goes haywire.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Now let me be precise. It's not that there's something special about those values, it's just that if you change them, the universe becomes something else.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, okay, that makes sense.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's haywire compared to what we're using,

[Chuck Nice]

what we have now.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That could be a new normal for whoever evolves in that universe. So maybe giving some points to this question, maybe the programmer figured out that the universe needs constants.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. It can't just not have constants and still function as a universe.

[Chuck Nice]

It doesn't work without the constants.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So maybe the existence of constants is the evidence that somebody programmed it.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And if you go Spinoza on this, then it's just God.

[Chuck Nice]

It's God.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's God or Andrew.

[Chuck Nice]

It's a good enough name for a God as far as I'm concerned.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So yeah, I'm there on it. Just to tighten up his inquiry. In referencing what we did before, I was imagining that certain measured quantities would have limits to him where there's no reason why it should have a limit. And it just cuts off.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because when you're programming in a computer, you have the limits of the space that you're creating.

[Chuck Nice]

Value parameters.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There it is. This goes between here and here. I can't make it infinity because I can't program infinity into a computer.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I gotta give it that. And let me put it way out there, the humans will never get there. They'll never know.

[Chuck Nice]

They'll never evolve to that point. Right, exactly right. And then you come back and somebody's like right there at the edge of your.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Like the Truman Show.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, exactly. How you get to the edge of the universe, I'm not ready for that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

All right, so this is Ben Canty. He says cabinet maker here in Sussex in the UK and a new Patreon subscriber.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Cabinet maker?

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Jesus made cabinets. Oh, carpenter.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes, he did.

He says, do you think an artificial Einstein Rosen Bridge could be opened without the brute force of using exotic matter? I wonder if there could be a workaround. What if we use laser pulsed resonance harmonics to manipulate the quantum vacuum directly and gently? Could we create a massive Casimir like effect using the localized vacuum pressure on

both sides to hold the opening apart,

rather than relying on negative mass? Now, let me just tell you this. Let me tell you this, Ben. Don't you call into this show, right into this show showing off like that. You start off with, I'm a cabinet maker. And then you going to throw in the use of the Casimir effect like that. Like we don't know that. You more than a cat. What museum do you work for? I know you working for some planetarium somewhere. Yeah. Anyway, I mean, he's out there. I like, I love what he's doing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I like where he's going.

[Chuck Nice]

I like what he's doing. He is out there, man.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Except the problem is the Casimir effect brings them together, right.

[Chuck Nice]

It doesn't push them apart.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It doesn't push them apart.

[Chuck Nice]

It actually attracts them.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The Casimir effect, it's a quantum phenomenon where two plates, if it's evacuated inside. They're close enough that I think the explanation is they end up sharing the same wave pattern. And then that itself creates a force that brings them together. So I don't see how that could pry it apart.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And he's got some laser.

[Chuck Nice]

Dual laser, laser pulse, quantum laser, pulsed resonant harmonics.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. So I'm. So just let me make it clear. We can make a wormhole, but without negative gravity stuff. It's unstable.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And so we pry it open. Okay. Step in. And then the thing collapses. You're gone.

[Chuck Nice]

Goodbye.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Who knows what happened to you.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

If a wormhole collapses on your ass. Oh, man. Okay, don't smile.

[Chuck Nice]

That would be. So. I mean, I don't want to find out, but it'd be cool to find out.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You don't want to be.

[Chuck Nice]

I don't want to be the guinea pig experiment, but yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right. So. I don't know. I don't think the Casimir effect gets you out of this.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And the laser pulsing on the vacuum energy. See, the vacuum energy is an energy source in the vacuum of space.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You can't think of the vacuum as

[Chuck Nice]

a thing like in a tube.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

In a tube. Right, right.

[Chuck Nice]

That's not how it works.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Exactly, exactly. You know, we think of vacuums as. A vacuum is a place where there's no air pressure.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's all it is.

[Chuck Nice]

That's all it is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's not a thing unto itself.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Where. Oh, here's some vacuum. Do stuff with it. No, that's not how that vacuum works out.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So we happen to have a word for where there is no air pressure and we call it a vacuum.

[Chuck Nice]

Vacuum.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. But if you. The vacuum. It said.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You know.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. And it's just like they're the nothing of space. Is something. You know what I mean?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right, right.

[Chuck Nice]

So, yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So anyhow, I mean, listen, I like where he's going.

[Chuck Nice]

This dude is making some beautiful cabinets and smoking some great weed while he's doing it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

His cabinet in the back might have a wormhole.

[Chuck Nice]

That would be so cool.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Ooh, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

All right. This is Jay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I think that's one last one. I'll give a two word answer to it. Go. Oh, that's all we have time for. Go.

[Chuck Nice]

Jay Valiano. How close does the constellation Andromeda need to be to the Milky Way for us to be able to reach it? Are we then able to colonize in theory, or is it moving too fast towards us for us to be able to find a habitable planet? If this is not possible, can we use a wormhole to reach Andromeda and tell it to change course for his final kamikaze? This is Jay Valiano from Holland.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He didn't know that it's not the constellation Andromeda that we have issues with.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Constellations are stars in our night sky. Way beyond those stars, there's another galaxy called 2 1/2 million light years away called the Andromeda Galaxy.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

In a day. Called the Andromeda Nebula. Before we knew it was a galaxy. In fact, it was the very first galaxy discovered.

[Chuck Nice]

Look at that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We found a star in this nebula. Wait a minute. That star. We know how bright that part's supposed to be. And it's way dimmer. This must be far outside the Milky Way. And Edwin Hubble discovered galaxies by figuring out what happened with the Andromeda Nebula. Woo. Okay, cool. Then we find out we're colliding towards each other.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes, but collision with galaxies doesn't mean collision like a car collision.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It'll look like a train wreck. But it's way more peaceful than that. Stars will just pass through each other. Space is mostly empty.

[Chuck Nice]

Empty.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, so how close would it have to be to find an exoplanet? The point is, we have hundreds of billions of stars in our own galaxy.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Why are you trying to look for some other galaxy? For a planet.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes, exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Stick with your own kind.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. Your partner's sunbathing in the backyard and you got your binoculars looking across the street. You don't have to do that. That look at your partner. It's right in the background right here.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You got all the action you need.

[Chuck Nice]

All the action you need.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right here. Right here. So in 10, I forgot the latest calcul. 12 billion years will collide.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But it's not a. It's not a smash. Again. We'll just pass through.

[Chuck Nice]

It's a pass through.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It'll be fun to watch.

[Chuck Nice]

It looks like. Wait, because. Wait, you showed me the picture of. I forget the galaxies that actually were colliding. And they look like starlings when they.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah. The gravity is changing for every single star. Some get cast hither and yon other wind up in orbits around others. And if a star comes too close to another star that has planets, it could be a flyby looting of planets.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, and the planet. And it's just like, come on over here.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's it. The gravitational forces are, you know.

[Chuck Nice]

And then the other star is left. Left. It's like. That's a Pimp star. That's what they call that. That's the pimp star. The pimp star rolls by and takes all the planets from the other star.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Fly by, fly by. Looting the planet.

[Chuck Nice]

Nice.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So anyhow, that's all time we have.

[Chuck Nice]

All right. Gotta love the doggone, Gotta love the doggone. Cosmic Queries grabbed. There it is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, Chuck. Always good to have you.

[Chuck Nice]

Always a pleasure.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Neil DeGrasse Tyson in another Cosmic Queries edition. Edition. As always, keep looking up.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

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