Stars Ask Neil To Save The Universe

Summary

StarTalk Radio Special: "Stars Ask Neil To Save The Universe"

Episode Air Date: August 7, 2026
Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson | Co-Hosts: Chuck Nice, Gary O'Reilly

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Episode Theme & Purpose

In this lively StarTalk Special Edition, Neil deGrasse Tyson is joined by Chuck Nice and Gary O'Reilly to field cosmic queries posed by an illustrious cast of celebrities and pop culture figures. Blending science, comedy, and geek culture, the episode brings lighthearted insight into some of the trickiest mysteries of the universe. Segments include questions from Steven Spielberg, Bill Prady, Hasan Minhaj, and more on topics like quantum gaps, the multiverse, Himalayan salt, alien encounters, and time travel.

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Key Discussions & Notable Segments

Opening – The Human Side of Celebrities

[02:43-03:41]

• The hosts relish that “celebrities have a geek soft underbelly” and cosmic curiosity.
• Neil jokingly notes some questions “got really personal… I was offended!” especially by Steven Spielberg’s inquiry.
• Quote:
  • “Celebrities…they’re people too. And they have a geek soft underbelly.” – Chuck Nice [02:47]

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1. Steven Spielberg Asks: Atom Gaps and FTL Travel

[04:38-13:19]

Spielberg’s Question:
"What is that gap where the nucleus is separated and you’ve got this gap? And is that gap a way to travel, to be able to defy having to go the speed of light to get somewhere?" [04:38]

• Neil and Chuck explain that an atom is mostly empty space, using the classic “popcorn in a stadium” analogy.
  • Quote:
    • “If you have a few Cracker Jack kernels in the middle of the field, the volume of the stadium is approximately where the electron represents.” – Chuck Nice [07:05]
• Historical background: Ernst Rutherford realized the empty nature of atoms; anecdote about being afraid to “fall through the floor” from knowing matter is mostly empty.
• Clarification that this empty space does not enable faster-than-light travel; explains energy levels/wave properties prevent the electron from collapsing into the nucleus.
• Touches on quantum tunneling and entanglement—avoiding conflation with atomic gaps.
• The pair joke Spielberg may be prepping for a sci-fi script.
• Fun fact: ET is “plant-based,” with the ability to revive plants.
  • Quote:
    • "ET was a vegetable, not an animal. That’s why ET had that magic finger that can make plants come back to life.” – Chuck Nice [13:00]

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2. Bill Prady (Co-creator, Big Bang Theory): Are Multiverses Real?

[17:57-22:09]

Prady’s Question:
"Are multiverses real or should they be?" [18:00]

• Chuck connects the question with Prady’s new HBO Max series premise: a character breaks spacetime and wanders into “multiple universes”.
• Neil details that “all theoretical evidence points to the existence of a multiverse,” referencing how quantum mechanics and general relativity "shotgun marry" and produce universes as quantum fluctuations.
  • Quote:
    • “When you do the math...multiple universes pop out of the equations. You got it for free.” – Chuck Nice [20:36]
• Cautions: If the multiverse exists, different universes could have different laws of physics—dangerous for exploration!
• Broader impact: They praise Prady’s TV work for making science and “geek comfort zones” more mainstream.
  • Quote:
    • “His show created a comfort zone for geeks. To exist in.” – Gary O’Reilly [22:31]

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3. Hasan Minhaj: Why Is Pink Himalayan Salt Pink?

[23:19-29:14]

Minhaj’s Question:
"Why is pink Himalayan salt pink? Are the Himalayas pink or is the rock pink?" [23:19]

• Chuck jokes about salt varieties as a status symbol; Neil recalls the Roman origin of “salary” as payments in salt.
• Scientific explanation: Pink color comes from iron oxide impurities (essentially, “rust”).
  • Quote:
    • “Hassan Minhaj, it’s rust. It’s rust you’re eating. You’re eating rusty salt.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson [27:32]
• Health myths debunked: Pink salt provides negligible iron compared to vegetables.
• Fun tangent: discussion of fatback as a flavoring in soul food.
• The team reiterates: colored salt is “just less refined,” while pure table salt is white sodium chloride.

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4. Josh Scherer (Mythical Kitchen): Which Foods Need Genetic Modification?

[30:29-36:04]

Scherer’s Question:
"What of the plants that we eat do you think is most currently lacking and needs an update?" [30:35]

• All agree: nearly all foods in stores today have been genetically modified, either by nature or humans.
• Addresses anti-GMO sentiment: “natural” corn would be tiny and far less nutritious.
• Joke: They propose “chocolate-flavored broccoli” to make vegetables more appealing for kids.
  • Quote:
    • “Chocolate broccoli. Let’s call it chocolatey.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson [33:15]
• Serious points: Highlight GMO crops for yield, climate adaptation, drought/frost resistance.
• Recalls public backlash over tomato genes borrowed from cold-water fish: a lesson that all life is connected.
  • Quote:
    • “What a celebration of life that actually is.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson [36:01]

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5. Riki Lindhome: Most Misunderstood Scientific Concept

[38:33-42:30]

Lindhome’s Question:
"What is the most misunderstood concept in the universe, and why do people keep getting it wrong?" [38:40]

• Neil’s top pet peeve: “Sound in space” in movies, especially sci-fi.
  • Quote:
    • “People persistently get wrong...they put sound in space… there’s an explosion, and you hear the explosion when you see it, which makes it doubly wrong.” – Chuck Nice [39:20]
• Rant: Sound needs a medium; there’s no air in space, so Star Wars "TIE fighter" sound effects are science fiction.
• Honorable mention: Not every space environment is weightless (if engines are firing, there’s gravity on board).
• Praises “The Expanse” for scientific realism in space travel presentation.

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6. Emily Blunt: Has Neil Encountered Aliens?

[42:33-49:11]

Blunt’s Question:
"Have you yourself had an alien encounter?" [42:33]

• Neil’s (humorous) answer: “I’m not authorized to comment further.” After banter, admits—no, he has not.
  • Quote:
    • “The answer is no, but it’s not for want of trying.” – Chuck Nice [43:16]
• Discussion of the Fermi Paradox and speculations: If aliens are here and hiding, it’s probably not good for humanity (“We are totally screwed…” – Chuck Nice [43:56]).
• Theorizes on how aliens might perceive human customs (e.g., language, swearing, necessity of sleep).
  • Quote:
    • “A single syllable comes out and the other person’s crying because of it...we’d be visited by cussing aliens.” – Chuck Nice [46:05]
• Science as universal language for first contact.

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7. Kevin Sussman: Time Travel and Quantum Physics

[50:05-52:46]

Sussman’s Question:
"If time travel were possible, could it be used to travel long distances using quantum physics?" [50:05]

• Explains that with time travel, the duration of a trip becomes irrelevant; you can “just time travel back into your past and you’re back to where you started.”
• Touches on sci-fi solutions (Stargates, portals) and the “paradox problem” of traveling backward in time.
• Mentions Stephen Hawking’s “time travel protection conjecture,” which would prevent paradoxes like killing your parents before you’re born.
  • Quote:
    • “Either it’s not possible at all or there’s some way to do it by using other universes.” – Chuck Nice [52:12]

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Memorable Quotes

• “Celebrities…they’re people too. And they have a geek soft underbelly.” – Chuck Nice [02:47]
• "If you have a few Cracker Jack kernels in the middle of the field, the volume of the stadium is approximately where the electron represents." – Chuck Nice [07:05]
• “Are multiverses real or should they be?” – Bill Prady [18:00]
• “All theoretical evidence points to the existence of a multiverse.” – Chuck Nice [21:08]
• “Hassan Minhaj, it’s rust. It’s rust you’re eating. You’re eating rusty salt.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson [27:32]
• “Chocolate broccoli. Let’s call it chocolatey.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson [33:15]
• “People persistently get wrong...they put sound in space.” – Chuck Nice [39:20]
• “The answer is no, but it’s not for want of trying.” – Chuck Nice [43:16]
• "Either it’s not possible at all or there’s some way to do it by using other universes." – Chuck Nice [52:12]

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Conclusion

This episode of StarTalk is both intellectually stimulating and filled with hearty, comedic exchanges. The hosts balance pop culture references with clear scientific explanations, debunking common myths while inviting listeners—and celebrity friends—into a welcoming, nerdy community. A must-listen for curious minds and fans of both science and geeky humor!

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Notable Segment Timestamps

• [04:38] – Steven Spielberg’s quantum gap question
• [17:57] – Bill Prady's multiverse question
• [23:19] – Hasan Minhaj asks about pink Himalayan salt
• [30:29] – Josh Scherer on the future of GMO foods
• [38:33] – Riki Lindhome: most misunderstood science concepts
• [42:33] – Emily Blunt: Neil and alien encounters
• [50:05] – Kevin Sussman: time travel & quantum physics

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Keep Looking Up!

Transcript

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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[Chuck Nice]

I love celebrities. Ask me, y'.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

It's just a reminder that, you know, they're people, too. And they have a geek soft underbelly.

[Gary O'Reilly]

They have cosmic curiosity just like the rest of us.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And they got really personal, those people. I gotta tell you, I was offended by some of those questions.

[Chuck Nice]

Steven Spielberg's question that offended you?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. What a nut he is.

[Chuck Nice]

Coming right up. Celebrities ask Neil. StarTalk Special Edition. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is Star Talk special edition, which means I got Gary O'Reilly.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Hello.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Hey, Gary.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, so today we have one of our occasional installments of Celebrities Ask Neil.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Oh.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, those are fun.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

And generally, you know, if I find myself around town on a movie set, as you do. As you do, as can happen on occasion, I'll just pull out my smartphone and see if they have a question for me if one of the celebs have a question for me. Because everybody's got a question about the universe, right? And so we gather enough of them on the shelf and bring them out as an entire episode.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You know, I do the same thing when I'm on set, and the answer always comes back, how did you get past security?

[Chuck Nice]

So it's kind of like cosmic queries for celebs.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, that's cool.

[Chuck Nice]

That's a way to think about it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Do we charge them like Patreon?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, give me my $5, by the way. $5, top tier. Forget the $5. These are stars we're talking about.

[Chuck Nice]

All right, so first up, let's see who we've got on the docket.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Neil, Steven Spielberg here to ask you a question. I'm not a physicist, and I don't have any real knowledge of quantum mechanics or any of this, but I am curious about what is the gap between an electron. What is that gap where the nucleus is separated and you've got this gap? And is that gap a way to travel to be able to defy having to go the speed of light to get somewhere?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wow. Where did you get to talk to Steven Spielberg? I mean, that was kind of wild. Steven Spielberg here. Where's that happening?

[Chuck Nice]

Well, so I had access.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, we just saw that.

[Chuck Nice]

So two things. As a StarTalk entity, we were invited to the early press encounters with the actors and producers and writers for Disclosure Day.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Nice.

[Chuck Nice]

And not only that, I also got a red carpet invite.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, cool.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, that was fun.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yours is in the mail.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, well, no, I got the blue carpet invite, I got the cease and desist exclusions.

[Chuck Nice]

So here we caught up with him when we were chatting with him about the film, putting together a whole episode on what the film was about and aliens. Cool, cool, cool. Yeah. So he asks a perceptive question that most people don't even think about.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

All right. So in an atom, there's empty space between the nucleus and the electron.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

What's the charge on the nucleus?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's a positive charge.

[Chuck Nice]

It's a positive charge. That's where all the protons are.

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. What's the charge on an electron?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's negative.

[Chuck Nice]

It's the opposite charge.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

All right. They attract, of course. Why doesn't the electron slam into the nucleus?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, they want to, but it's kind of a Montague and Capulet type thing, so they're being kept apart from one another even though they love each other dearly.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, thank you, Shakespeare, for that. Romeo and Juliet.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So the distance, is that the Max Planck sort of scenario?

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, Planck is much smaller than that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Much smaller than him.

[Chuck Nice]

But if you want to get a sense of how big that gap is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

You have a few kernels of. What's that? Popcorn they eat in stadiums?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Popcorn? Cracker Jack.

[Chuck Nice]

Cracker Jack. If you have a few Cracker Jack colonels in the middle of the field, the volume of the stadium is approximately where the electronics represent.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Where the election.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's amazing. It's that much.

[Chuck Nice]

It's that much.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That much space.

[Chuck Nice]

That much space.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's incredible.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. And the first guy who discovered there was that much space, his name is Ernst Rutherford.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He loved baseball.

[Chuck Nice]

He's a New Zealander. New Zealander, Yes. Ernst Rutherford.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Kiwi.

[Chuck Nice]

A Kiwi. One of your colonies.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Thank you for reminding me of our colonial past again.

[Chuck Nice]

Plus, I think they still have your Union Jack on their flag.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah, that's. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

So you went there, keyed on all their flags, and it's still there. Okay.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I don't think we actually did that, but.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Don't let it get away. Of a good story.

[Chuck Nice]

All right? Right. So he was the first to discover all this empty space. And it's rumored, just rumored, that the next morning he was afraid to step out of his bed out of fear that he would fall through the floor.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Nice.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That was one hell of a dream

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

he had, I'm gonna say, the night before he got high. I don't know what. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Realizing that most of matter was just simply empty space. All right, so that's One factor that alone has nothing to do with faster than light travel. But it is an intriguing fact that the electron does not collapse into the nucleus.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So what Spielberg is doing there is he foreseeing a movie that he wants to make, to explore.

[Chuck Nice]

Could be.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Is this through the gap? I wanna call it space, but not in the classic terms.

[Chuck Nice]

Wouldn't be the first time that happened with me.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. I got a phone call from Seth MacFarlane, said, Neil, I'm gonna be in town. Can we do lunch? And I definitely made lunch for Seth. And we had lunch, and he asked me all these questions about the Big Bang, the age of the universe and everything. And then six months later, there's an entire Family Guy episode where Stewie's time machine takes them back to the Big Bang.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

To the Big Bang. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

And at the end, it says, science consultant Neil Grass Tyson.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Nice.

[Chuck Nice]

It should have said lunch. Conversation with Neil Grasse. So there's that gap. So here's why the electron can't just fall in, all right? Because the space occupied by the electron is set by its wavelength because it's also a wave, the wave particle duality. If the wave can't fit in a smaller space, it's not going there. It's going to occupy the bigger volume.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Cool.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, so just something to keep in mind. You can't just stick it anywhere.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. So now, what he might have also been hinting to was quantum tunneling.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right? Right.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. And quantum tunnel, when you have entangled particles. Right. They're entangled and they know about each other. And when you observe one of them, the other one manifests at faster than the speed of light.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

So I think he was.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He was kind of conflating the two

[Chuck Nice]

there a little bit, but I think his heart's in the right place.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Because he's thinking this.

[Gary O'Reilly]

What happens if you change the frequency

[Chuck Nice]

on the wavelength of the what of the electron?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Is what he's saying.

[Chuck Nice]

You can adjust the energy levels of the electron with a magnetic field.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You can excite them or de. Excite them.

[Chuck Nice]

You can do things. But the structure of the nucleus is really what's responsible for all of what the electrons will do outside of it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right?

[Chuck Nice]

Right. And so badly did we want atoms to resemble solar systems?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

So badly. Cause we wanted. It's easy to think to this.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

To think you have a center like the sun and then other things.

[Chuck Nice]

It's just that all the way down. Yeah, it's just all the way up and all the way down.

[Gary O'Reilly]

It's Mother Nature.

[Chuck Nice]

Replicating so badly did we want that? That we call the electron positions orbitals.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Instead of orbits. Right orbitals. So they're statistically configured places where you would find the electron around the nucleus. The point is, when anything tunnels in quantum physics, it goes across a barrier instantaneously.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

And when you have two quantum entangled particles, they manifest instantaneously. Okay. As far as any of our measurements and calculations go. Okay. One is here and one is here. Yeah. Right. So how close are we to harnessing that? We got top people working on doing. Trying to do just that.

[Gary O'Reilly]

For how long?

[Chuck Nice]

They've been working for, like, at least 10 years.

[Gary O'Reilly]

They're slacking.

[Chuck Nice]

Quantum physics is hard stuff.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Step it up. Quantum physicists, step it up. So the electron has a field.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. Yes. So do the proton.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So does the proton. So is it the fields that are interfering that keeps them apart?

[Chuck Nice]

No, no. It's the fact that you cannot physically. Physically put an electron.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Electron in that space. Right. Okay. All right.

[Chuck Nice]

So it's no different from why a microwave can't get out of a microwave oven.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

Because the holes. Are the holes in the door smaller

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

than the wave itself.

[Chuck Nice]

So the wave came. Doesn't even know the holes there. Right, Right. So anyhow, I think you're right. He might be thinking of a movie or something.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Maybe.

[Gary O'Reilly]

It wouldn't be a surprise.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That'd be kind of cool.

[Chuck Nice]

It'd be kind of cool.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nothing wrong with that.

[Gary O'Reilly]

See how he wants to take that forward?

[Chuck Nice]

All right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Do we three get an assist if the film gets made?

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, get a mention. Honorable mention.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Really?

[Chuck Nice]

And the first time I ever met him, it was in this office.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, really?

[Chuck Nice]

VIP services. Apparently he made a request, brought one of his sons in who was just at that age, maybe 14, 13. Very nice. Yeah, yeah. And it's. And we chatted. And that's when I learned. Because I asked.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Go ahead.

[Chuck Nice]

That ET Was a vegetable, not an animal.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That makes sense.

[Chuck Nice]

ET Was plant based. I believe that that's why ET had that magic finger that can make plants

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

come back to life. Make all the plants come back to life.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, yeah. That finger, it could touch a plant, and the plant rejuvenates.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I basically remember it.

[Chuck Nice]

So there it is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's very cool. Okay.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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[Chuck Nice]

hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to StarTalk every night and support StarTalk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil Degrasse Tyson. All right, next up. Hi, I'm Bill Prady, co creator of the new HBO Max series, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe. And I have a really critical question for you, Neil.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And this is, everything depends on it.

[Chuck Nice]

Are multiverses real or should that be? Is the multiverse real or should it be?

[Gary O'Reilly]

Are there multiple universes?

[Chuck Nice]

One of those three questions is critical. Okay, so you know who Bill Brady is other than. So there's. He's got this new show, Stewart Fails to Save the Universe. The premise of that is this character Stuart, right, is he breaks the space time continuum and is accidentally wandering into multiple universes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, now what did he break? A device made by Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory. So Bill Prady co created the Big Bank Theory with Chuck Lorre. Chuck Lorre, who also created Two and a Half Men.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And every other thing that you've seen on tv. Every other thing. Yeah, pretty much Chuck Lorre.

[Chuck Nice]

And so I'm known to them perhaps through StarTalk. But even in the day, I was invited to give two cameos on the Big Bang Theory.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, very nice.

[Chuck Nice]

One in season three and one in season seven or eight. The last season.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Last season.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That's cool.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, that's very cool.

[Chuck Nice]

First cameo, I argue with Sheldon about Pluto's planet status.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. Then the second one, I'm settling scores by phone. Okay. Calling people up in sequence. And one of the lines that was written on the spot was not in the script. On the spot is. All right, who else needs a Degrasse whooping?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, that's funny.

[Chuck Nice]

That was good.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's a good one.

[Chuck Nice]

That's a good line.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right.

[Chuck Nice]

So anyway, that's who he is. And so apparently Stewart, who is a character from the Big Bang Theory, perhaps the most awkward, geekiest character among the geeky characters is Stuart. He owns the comic book store. The comic book store. He needs to know if there's a real multiverse. Otherwise, the premise of the whole show fails pretty much. Okay. When you do the math, merging quantum physics and general relativity, the physics of the small and the physics of the large, there was a point in the past when the large was small. That was the Big Bang. There's the shotgun marriage. When you do that at a math level beyond my reach, that's what we need Brian Greene for. Multiple universes. Pop out of the equations.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

It wasn't like we tried to put.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You didn't try to make it happen.

[Chuck Nice]

It just.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You got it.

[Chuck Nice]

You got it for free. You got it for free. And you have quantum fluctuations. And every time you have quantum fluctuation, things happen. And if you're having quantum fluctuations, when the whole universe is the size of a fluctuation, the whole universe becomes one of those fluctuations.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. And there are variations on the multiverse. In fact, I invite the listener reader to see the Stark talk book, Cosmic Queries. There's a whole section on there on how the universe will end. And it talks about multiverses. There's a whole discussion in there on that. So Bill Prady. Bill Prady. All theoretical evidence points to the existence of a multiverse. Whether we will ever one day be able to interact with it by some backdoor method remains to be seen. But if it's a fluctuation, other things would have fluctuated as well, such as the laws of physics. Very dangerous.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Which means we don't want to go there, correct?

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, very dangerous. So, Bill, take it and run with it. May your show send check here?

[Gary O'Reilly]

No, stop.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You send it to Star Talk, care of Chuck. Nice.

[Chuck Nice]

So. So there it is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's cool, man.

[Chuck Nice]

So, Bill, keep up the good, fun work. You finally gave the geekiverse a Hollywood voice. Yeah, man, I don't know how else to say that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, that's a good way to say it. You gotta. I think he's part of the reason from, I'll say, a pop culture and general culture framing that people are far more open to scientific information because of his show. And as long as it's been on

[Gary O'Reilly]

the air, because his show's created a comfort zone for geeks. To exist in.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

That's the better way to say it than the way I said it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

It's a comfort zone.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's a comfort zone for geeks.

[Chuck Nice]

And while still celebrating their brilliance, you know, you can still make fun, but. But no one. At the end of the day, you don't get the sense that anyone's feelings are getting hurt or they're getting exploited for their lack of social skills. It's kind of a celebration of, this is who I am. Deal with it. And I'll make a mistake here, but that's. I'm self aware and I'm shy when others are not, but that's just what I am.

[Gary O'Reilly]

It's been crafted.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And he doesn't talk down to make the jokes.

[Chuck Nice]

Good point.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You know, he actually makes. He leaves the science. The science and then writes a sitcom around that. Ooh.

[Chuck Nice]

You know, good thinking about it. Which is really cool. Yeah. Yeah. All right, next up. Hey, Neil. It's comedian Hassan Minhaj. Look, I got a question for you. Why is pink Himalayan salt pink? Like, are the Himalayas pink or is the rock pink?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Or am I eating a piece of the Himalayas?

[Gary O'Reilly]

What's going on?

[Chuck Nice]

So, first of all, I was duly informed by who. I don't remember, that if you have more than one kind of salt in your cabinets, you're rich.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That is not true. I can vouch for that for certain. Okay. Because I have coarse sea salt. I have pink Himalayan salt. I have black salt. Okay. And then, of course, Morton's evidence of

[Chuck Nice]

how much we're paying you. Nah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, that's what I'm saying.

[Chuck Nice]

No, no. I'm just saying.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, but what they don't. What the people don't know is they pay me in salt. Like it's 200 B.C.

[Gary O'Reilly]

yeah. Back in the day.

[Chuck Nice]

Back in the day. Back in the day. That's where the word salary comes from. Salt. Oh, yes, that's very cool. When the Romans paid their soldiers and salt and salt. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Nice.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, yeah. So I'm just saying, if you go up in the hood, nobody's got more than one kind of salt in the cabinet.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Now, that's true.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm just saying.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's true. That's because, you know, black people know how to flavor their food. They don't need five kinds of salt.

[Chuck Nice]

They got other.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They got other things. We got stuff like fat back. All right? You don't need no damn Himalayan salt when you got fat back. Okay,

[Chuck Nice]

but do you know what fat back is?

[Gary O'Reilly]

No.

[Chuck Nice]

That's what I was wondering.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I Was just thinking. I don't want to ask. I don't want to ask.

[Chuck Nice]

I'll tell you. A fat back is a slab of a pig that doesn't have enough meat to even slice it into bacon.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

Which is itself half fat. Right, Right. This has less meat than a fatty bacon does.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

And you pop that in.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But used correctly, it will flavor the hell out of anything, especially collard greens. Collard greens.

[Chuck Nice]

You just throw it in there.

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. And the vegetarians be damned.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Julie knows you don't let them know that it's in there.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Oh, my God.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I've never had greens this good. Oh, my God. What's your secret? I'm just. Oh, it's just wonderful. I've just never had greens so flavorful.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Oh.

[Chuck Nice]

So I think fatback is the between state of existence of bacon and lard.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, basically.

[Chuck Nice]

What do you think of that? Yeah, that's a pretty accurate. Yeah. All right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Not to be confused with the pork belly, which is just the opposite of the fat back.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, go ahead. So there's salt in so many places on Earth. Cause you just need a lake that has been around long enough to become salty. And then the lake evaporates and leaves a salt residue. And then it gets buried. And we have. On another episode, we learn that the crystalline state of atoms or molecules is the lowest energy state that it can acquire. So that once it hits that state, it's that way basically forever.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Forever.

[Chuck Nice]

Basically. All right. So that's why you can dig up salt. That's why salt is in mines where the salt's been there for a million years.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

There it is. Or however.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Why is it pink then?

[Chuck Nice]

Says the man who today is wearing

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

a pink, my favorite color. You look good in it. I like it.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. I don't agree.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You don't like it?

[Chuck Nice]

No. What's wrong? You don't have to wear it. So it comes from impurities in the pure crystal lattice of the salt molecule, which is sodium chloride. Okay. And in this case, the impurity is an iron oxide, so diffusion. Oh, okay. Let me call it that. Okay. Hassan. Minhaj is rust. It's rust you're eating.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You're eating rusty salt. Oh, rusty ass salt. That's what you're eating.

[Chuck Nice]

So you're telling me, would you pay for that salt?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

How much you pay for that rusty ass salt?

[Gary O'Reilly]

Let's make it feel slightly better. It's centuries of crushed flamingos.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, I like flamingos.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I like that.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, but they have to get pink first. Well, they got to Eat. They got to eat.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They got to eat the fish, the

[Gary O'Reilly]

little shrimp and krill, and gives them the keratin.

[Chuck Nice]

They got to eat that first. Then they become pink, Then they come pink.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Then they get.

[Chuck Nice]

And then they get crushed, and then you get your pink suit. Thank you for that new hypothesis. First they have to hike to the Himalayas, which named last night flamingos. Ain't going to Himalayas, I promise you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Hilarious.

[Chuck Nice]

These are trace amounts of this iron oxide that's in there. And you can ask, well, how much is in there? Is it a good source of iron? Yes, it is a source of iron, but so many other foods you eat in a day, especially fresh vegetables.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Absolutely.

[Chuck Nice]

Are so much more ironic sources of iron, far beyond what you're getting in the salt. So while it might look pretty in a transparent salt shaker, salt grinder, which I have at home,

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

but of course, wouldn't be so gauche as to put

[Chuck Nice]

my salt in it. To buy it. Opaque. To buy it on the premise that you are somehow healthier for it is an overstatement of its nutritional value.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You're ripping yourself off.

[Chuck Nice]

To you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So salt is overly processed, and pink Himalayan salt is just lazy salt.

[Chuck Nice]

So. Correct. So other salts might have some tinge to them, but they refine it to remove the other minerals.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

And you're left with pure salt.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Sodium chloride.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Because everybody wants, you know, for table salt, it's supposedly, you know, white is better, you know, because, like. All right, let's be real, right? Anyway, but if you were. If you went back in the day and you got salt. It was gray.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. I have gray salt as well.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Your salt was gray, and that's, like, the most natural salt you're gonna get. So. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

And Hassan Minaj, we love him. And I was on his podcast, and I just thought, I can't exit his podcast.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He was on your live show. Yes, he was.

[Chuck Nice]

He was on StarTalk Live.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Really smart guy. And I first saw him through his appearances on the Daily Show.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, cool.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, Hasan, something else about your pink salt from the Himalayas, other salt that is white or otherwise colorless, if you

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

look at it, colonized that Himalayan salt and went in there and took that Himalayan salt and said, listen, y', all, pink salt, y' all gonna understand something.

[Chuck Nice]

Chuck is still in therapy.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I know, but he seems quite happy.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He's been completely happy. Anytime I can get a chance. That's all I'm saying.

[Chuck Nice]

Next up. Hey, my name's Josh Scherer, and I'm the Host of Last Meals on Mythical Kitchen.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And I have a question for Neil.

[Chuck Nice]

Since the beginning of time, humans have been manipulating plants via cross breeding and later GMOs. What of the plants that we eat do you think is most currently lacking

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

and needs an update?

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, I love that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I love that.

[Chuck Nice]

There's hardly any food in the grocery store that has not been genetically modified from its original form.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There's almost no food on Earth that has not been genetically modified.

[Chuck Nice]

Basically true. There are a few things like wild caught tuna. Okay, that's not been genetically modified. But almost everything else, we have modified it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And even if we haven't modified it, nature genetically modifies itself.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Just like a corn, just on the original cones.

[Chuck Nice]

Original corns this big.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah, they're big.

[Chuck Nice]

Now they're this big. And people say, ooh, I want natural corn.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

I don't want GMO corn. Oh, you want natural corn.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You want some, like, malnutrition.

[Chuck Nice]

That's what you want. You want corn that you could eat

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

18 of them and you'd still be hungry.

[Chuck Nice]

Right, Exactly. So the only difference is GMOs. What we think of as GMOs are accomplishing the same thing that we did in artificial selection.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Correct.

[Chuck Nice]

But we just do it in a laboratory.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let's do it in our lab.

[Chuck Nice]

And both of those are what nature does all by itself. How else are you going to get from single celled organisms to elephants?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Absolutely. Somebody's doing some serious genetically genetic modification. Right. But sometimes you can just leave plants and they will do it themselves. Yeah, they'll actually cross breed. Flowers will do it.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, do it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's crazy.

[Chuck Nice]

Do it till you're satisfied. I say we'll do it. That's a 70s disco.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, man, that's hilarious.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, they'll cross me with whatever they. They might. In a limiting case. I'm told by experts in the field that there are apple trees where different trunks of the tree are differently grafted so that the same tree can give you multiple kinds of apples.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, that's like.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I love that.

[Chuck Nice]

It's like nature. I'm gonna make my own cornucopia.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right, Exactly. I want a Fuji Gala Granny Smith tree.

[Chuck Nice]

So I have to pick a plant that I think is in dire need of some more genetic modification. Right, okay, let me think about that. Do you have. Are you thinking one?

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah, I'm trying. I'm just racking my brains. Mainly it's vegetables to give them a flavor that allow kids to Want to eat them? Oh.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, that's good.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Chocolate flavored broccoli.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Chocolate broccoli. Oh, we'll call it chocolatey.

[Gary O'Reilly]

We're in.

[Chuck Nice]

There you go.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's chocolate broccoli. It's chocolate broccoli. Chocolate broccoli.

[Chuck Nice]

It's a reference from 1980s Saturday Night Live.

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

True, Very true, very true.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I wasn't aware of that.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I know.

[Chuck Nice]

So let's agree on that. That broccoli, the famous food to be hated by children, we need to get them to like that food, and we need to infuse it with something we know they will like and that they will like. So let's get the chocolate gene.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Either that or we work on the jelly belly. Multiple flavors, and then you choose which

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

one you contemplate in the broccoli. Yeah. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, different florets. How you like my vocabulary?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I'm good with that.

[Chuck Nice]

Different florets would have different flavors.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

So you'd have multicolored broccoli with different flavors. That would be. The kids would be eating that up.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, there it is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We can't have kids eating rainbow broccoli. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

On a serious note, a whole other reason for GMO plants, which is more broadly called genetic engineering, is you can genetically engineer plants, for example, to have two crops in one season. If it's early maturing, and then that doubles your yield.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Your yield.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

Or you can have one that can survive colder temperatures.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. Or drought. Drought resistant.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly. So they don't evaporate as much water out of their surfaces. Exactly. So there are many reasons why one would do this.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. And by the way, that's gonna become far more necessary as the planet.

[Gary O'Reilly]

They're already working on taking native species of plants and trees from heat, very hot areas that are drought resistant, and

[Chuck Nice]

taking them over and taking them again,

[Gary O'Reilly]

growing them and developing them. So, yeah, that's way ahead of the story.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But, yeah, it has to be, because crop yields are already suffering because of climate crisis, and it's only going to get worse.

[Chuck Nice]

There was a controversial GMO where they got some gene from a fish that thrives in sub zero temperatures of salt water. So, like 30 degrees, 31 degrees.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

And they put that in a tomato, which prevents tomatoes from freezing in the first frost.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right, the frost. They're frost resistant.

[Chuck Nice]

Frost resistant, yeah. Correct. And people freak. Does it. I don't want my fish in a tomato. And rather than say, oh, my gosh, all life is connected.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

Wait, we. That's no Frankenmato not only are fish our ancestors, there's an earlier ancestor that's the ancestor of both animals and plants.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Correct.

[Chuck Nice]

And green plants.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

So what a celebration of life that actually is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Yep.

[Chuck Nice]

All right. There once was a magic sorry at Kennedy Space Station Center Visitor Complex. We don't do fairy tales. We do real, like real adventures to Mars or real journeys into the future to see how imagination can really take us to strange new worlds. And real trips into the past where we meet heroes and legends way ahead of their time. Real rockets, real astronauts, real adventure. All at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Discover something real.

[Gary O'Reilly]

These days we're used to getting things delivered on demand. Groceries, a new gadget, or the latest box book expanding your view of the universe. And now you can add t mobile 5G home Internet to that list. Just order from T Mobile and enjoy same day delivery with doordash. And you can set it up yourself in about 15 minutes. No advanced engineering degree required. That means more time doing the things you actually enjoy, like streaming a space documentary or going down a rabbit hole about exoplanets, asteroids or whatever's pulling your curios. And those online explorations are a lot easier with the fastest 5G home Internet. So if you're moving into a new place or just ready to upgrade your connection to something a little more Advanced, visit t mobile.com homeinternet to check availability and get your home Internet delivered today. Same day delivery for most Internet eligible customers. See if it's an option during checkout. Fastest according to OOKLA Speed test intelligence data. Second half 2025. All rights reserved.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Insurance isn't one size fits all. That's why drivers have trusted progressives. Name your price tool for years. Just tell Progressive what you want to pay and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. Visit progressive.com to find a car insurance rate that works for you. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and cover match limited by state law.

[Chuck Nice]

Next up. Hi, I'm Riki Lindholm. I play Ramona on Stuart fails to save the universe.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And here is my question.

[Chuck Nice]

What is the most misunderstood concept in the universe? And why do people keep getting it wrong? Ooh, love that. So Ricky Lindholm was an intermittently recurring character in the Big Bang Theory and now she's a regular. And Stewart fails to save the universe. The universe. So she plays a most excellent geek in the series. Once again, a celebration of a culture. Really? The geekiverse? Yeah, yeah, completely so that's an excellent question. And I Would say what people persistently get wrong is that they put sound in space.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm gonna say, yeah, that's a good one.

[Chuck Nice]

And then not giving it up. Right. I go up and slap him. Do it again the next time.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

There's an explosion. And you hear the explosion when you

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

see it, which makes it doubly wrong.

[Chuck Nice]

You don't even hear lightning when you see thunder on earth.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's correct.

[Chuck Nice]

And now there's an explosion out in Bass, and the star blows up and you hear the explosion at the same time.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

With everything that's going on in the world, that's what annoys you in a

[Chuck Nice]

movie where they're trying to get their science right. Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right. So, Chuck, I remember you saying that the TIE fighter. I just happened to have a TIE fighter, of course. Here in my office. That these make sounds in the vacuum of space.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

And it's exactly the same sound they made in Earth in a planetary.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Planetary atmosphere. Yes. Same with their. Same with their cannons, you know, and. Yeah. Out in the vacuum of space.

[Chuck Nice]

So, Ricky, that's. That's my biggest issue.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right.

[Chuck Nice]

And I just given up.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

People just get it wrong.

[Chuck Nice]

Just get it wrong and.

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right, what else?

[Chuck Nice]

What else?

[Gary O'Reilly]

There's gotta be something else.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, you want another one?

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay. You've got more than one itch that you want to scratch.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, here's a more subtle one. Okay. People think that anytime you are in space, you are weightless. That is not true. It's not true. If your engines are firing, you have weight inside the craft. And if you want to go anywhere, you're going to fire your engines. So if you turn off your engines, then you're coasting, falling into wherever you're going. And since you're in free fall, only then are you weightless.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

And the movie Ad Astra.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

To getting back and forth to the moon in a matter of hours rather than three days. Three days is the coasting time that it takes to get there. Three days. In other words, you fire your engines, shut them off, you coast until the moon's gravity does the rest. Does the rest. Yeah. Okay. And you're coasting the whole time. You're weightless the whole time. But, you know, if you're in a hurry and you don't want to wait three days, you want to get there in three hours, you're burning your rockets the whole time you're burning your rockets. You are not weightless. And in that movie, they showed the burning rockets, and inside they're all just floating.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Floating around.

[Chuck Nice]

It's like. No, no.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So what's the prohibitor on burning your engines all the way to the moon? Is it the weight?

[Chuck Nice]

How big is your fuel tank now, exactly. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

That's the weight entirely. So a real future would be filling stations in space. Then you could burn all the way to the filling station and then burn again.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Solar powered.

[Chuck Nice]

Sure. But the farther away from the sun you go, the less intense the sunlight is. By the inverse square law of light that we talked about on a prior episode.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That is correct.

[Chuck Nice]

With my butter gun. So I guess it's Google butter gun startalk. So. And the show that gets it correct all the time is the Expanse.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

They get all their accelerations correct.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They do. They do.

[Chuck Nice]

Two thumbs up. All right, next up.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Hi, Neil.

[Chuck Nice]

I've always had this question for you. Have you yourself had an alien encounter.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Ooh.

[Chuck Nice]

Ooh. We know who that is. She did not identify herself.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes, but you can tell by her.

[Chuck Nice]

Maybe she didn't need to.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. How big she is.

[Chuck Nice]

Mm. And she had a little bit of accent there.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Oh, no, she doesn't have an accent. You have an accent.

[Chuck Nice]

Very good.

[Gary O'Reilly]

She does not.

[Chuck Nice]

You're outnumbered here. We can kick your ass.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Very good.

[Chuck Nice]

Watch what you say. This is America, Jack.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Bashabrit Day. Another Bashabrit Day.

[Chuck Nice]

So I'm delighted to answer that question, and I'm not authorized to comment further.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There you go. I don't know who this guy is.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So we end up with, is it the Fermi paradox, where the aliens are probably here anyway, or why would they go this far just to.

[Chuck Nice]

I know. So it's a whole. So the question was, have I encountered an alien? The answer is no, but it's not for want of trying.

[Gary O'Reilly]

But have you done so not knowingly. That you had.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But that doesn't count because that means that maybe all of us have done so. Not knowing.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly. Then my answer would not be, if I don't know, then you don't know.

[Gary O'Reilly]

No, I agree. I'm just saying. Do you think the possibility is that we, you, Chuck, everybody watching and listening, has had an alien encounter, but has no knowledge of the fact that it happened?

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, so if that's true for everyone, then it's. It's true for no one.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. And by the way, if aliens are here unannounced and they're observing us, it is because from wherever they came, there are more of them coming. And that is why they don't want to let us know that they are Here, which means we are totally screwed. So I don't know these people who are just like, well, they gotta be here. They have. Well, you're a dumbass. Because quite frankly, if they are, that is the end of us. Because anybody who can reach us is so much more advanced than we could ever hope to be that when they come here, they're like, yeah, this is ours now. Hope y' all don't lie.

[Chuck Nice]

Only if they behave as we have.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, my point is this. The only reason they would conceal the fact that they are here is because

[Chuck Nice]

in anticipation, behave the way we do.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So we got grabby aliens. What about if they're not grabby aliens? But they've got a real twisted sense of humor.

[Chuck Nice]

That could happen now.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That'd be awesome.

[Gary O'Reilly]

How about that?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, then I'd be heartbroken that I didn't meet them, to be honest.

[Chuck Nice]

And I got one for you. I got one for you.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Think about us and our sense of humor and how it can go in different levels. Just imagine an alien like that.

[Chuck Nice]

I spent a few pages on this in my book. All right, take me to your leader. A couple of pages. Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I'm about halfway through that.

[Chuck Nice]

You are? Okay. The book is not very long.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I'm a slow reader. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

The book is like this. The book is this thick.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Anything you want to do make me feel better?

[Chuck Nice]

I have a beginner's version of the. So I try to think about what we look like to the aliens because they would find it intriguing. I think that we have these sounds we project forward vibrating air molecules that reach another person and that they know our thoughts for having done so if they don't otherwise interact with sound the way we do. Okay, that's kind of interesting then. What might be more interesting is there are some sounds that come out of our mouths that are single syllables that could completely offend another person. They're called curse words.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

That's weird. A single syllable comes out and the other person's crying because of it. So then. So we'd have to teach the alien that this is just cussing and.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Well, the first thing you do if you're in another country.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Learn the curse words.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah, the first thing that happens is you learn the rude words.

[Chuck Nice]

No, the first thing I do is learn their food. Okay. I don't know what countries you go to or what you are after.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay. I'm taking eating for granted.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Gary O'Reilly]

But the first words you learn in another language, if you're there, are the swear words.

[Chuck Nice]

I have done that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. You gotta Learn both. So that when you eat the food you can go, damn, that's true.

[Chuck Nice]

Both. So all I'm saying is it would be kind of cool if the aliens also had single syllable curse words. We'd be visited by cussing aliens. That would just be funny.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Gleep, you.

[Gary O'Reilly]

If you think about it, if they've got enough technology to transverse universal alien speak.

[Chuck Nice]

Gleep, Gleep.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I mean, think the technology to transverse large tracks of galaxies, galaxies, universe and arrive here. They're not gonna need to learn a language. They just bump if they press. If they don't, that's going to be able to interpret everything.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. Either did learn a language quickly and they'll just speak English if they land in an English speaking country. Or they read our minds. You know, that could happen.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I'm insane.

[Chuck Nice]

Because urges and emotions and thoughts don't require words to know that they exist within us.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That's interesting that they don't need the. The audible language. They can just go straight through.

[Chuck Nice]

Right, exactly. And know the feeling and know the attitude. So I'm just. I burned some pages on this. My favorite one is you befriend the alien.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Then after a certain number of hours, you say, excuse me, I have to lay down horizontally and go semi comatose for a third of Earth's rotation.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

And the alien says what? And you say what? Don't you sleep? So sleep is just what we do.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. It's a weird thing.

[Chuck Nice]

It's a weird. It's completely weird.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And it has to be vital to us, otherwise we'll have evolved not to need it.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. And you're so vulnerable, like asleep.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah. You're not belly up procreating. And you're in danger.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. So I think a lot about what this might be like. And as a result, I carry some scientific tools to present to an alien in a first encounter. Because that would be language we have in common science and math. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But otherwise Pythagoras. Pythagorean theorem, most certainly. Yeah. So yeah, I'm sad that I've not met aliens, but it's not for want of trying. There's a book called where to find them. No. A book how to avoid being abducted by aliens. Just be how to avoid an alien abduction. I read that book cover to cover and I disobeyed every instruction within it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And they still didn't want you.

[Chuck Nice]

Don't put it that way, Chuck. They didn't want me, so. And that was of course, Emily Blunt. Okay. Who was in Devil wears Prada Right? As Emily.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

And she was also Mary Poppins, one of my favorite characters.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, okay.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Big shoes to fill.

[Chuck Nice]

I know, I know.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Big shoes to fill.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Nah, she's great.

[Chuck Nice]

And dare I say. Dare, dare, dare I say. And I'm not one to do this. I think she gave an Academy Award winning performance in Disclosure day.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Wow.

[Chuck Nice]

Given the range of acting she needed to display.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wow.

[Chuck Nice]

She's inhabited by the spirit of these aliens. And so she. Her character is different.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, now I gotta manifest. I gotta see the movie.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very cool, Emily Blunt. Thank you, Emily. Guys, we got time for one more.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Here we go. Hi, I'm Kevin Sussman. I play Stuart on Stuart Fails to Save the Universe. Here's my question for you, Neil. If time travel were possible, could it be used to travel long distances using quantum physics?

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, so that is the steward character that was just lifted up from Big Bang Theory. And this next show pivots on him and his exploits and he brings his friends.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, not according to that question, it doesn't.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Just sounds like he wants to save on airfield.

[Chuck Nice]

So if you can time travel.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

Then it doesn't matter how long it takes you to get somewhere.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Nope.

[Chuck Nice]

You just time travel back into your

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

past and you're back to where you started.

[Chuck Nice]

Where you started, but in a different place.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

Seems to me it's kind of cool.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Be kind of cool using kind of like a Stargate portal.

[Chuck Nice]

You could. But I'm just saying, even if you didn't, you just go back in time to when.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

You didn't burn all those years.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, that'd be great.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So what's the theory about traveling back and traveling forward in time?

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. So we know how to travel forward in time. We don't really know how to travel backwards in time, although Richard Gott III wrote a book called Time Travel in Einstein's Universe. It's in our archives. You can dig it up. A conversation I had. He's a friend and colleague. We've co written three books.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Nice.

[Chuck Nice]

Together. Back when I was at Princeton. And germinated from back when I was in Princeton. So traveling backwards, you get the paradox problem. And hence Stephen Hawking suggested one day we will stumble on, or find on purpose the time travel protection conjecture, which prevents you from traveling back in time to kill your parents, which would then prevent you from having been born to go back in time to kill your parents.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

That's a paradox.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That's a.

[Chuck Nice]

That he wants to avoid. So either it's not possible at all. Or there's some way to do it but using other universes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Now that makes sense. That's kind of cool. Yeah. If only James Cameron. I'm glad nobody told James Cameron this or we would have never had the Terminator.

[Chuck Nice]

Plus, you don't have to kill the people, you just have to prevent them from having sex in the moment that would have produced you. True. Have sex 10 minutes later.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. And guess what? You'd probably be another you.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wow.

[Chuck Nice]

So he's the geekiest one of the whole series.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Well, I might have to check out Stuart Fails to Save the Universe. The only show about failure that is good to watch.

[Chuck Nice]

So I think that's all time we have. We have more though. We have more.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm sure we got plenty of more stars that want to ask questions.

[Chuck Nice]

All right. So been fun. Always good to have you guys.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Likewise.

[Chuck Nice]

This is Neil DeGrasse Tyson StarTalk Special Edition right here from my office, the Hayden Planetarium. Until next time, keep looking up.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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[Chuck Nice]

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