Joe Rogan Experience #310 — Neil Degrasse Tyson Transcript

Transcript

0:00 the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night I was so happy when I saw you do this. Oh, okay. and Earth is going to die, they don't even know what's gonna happen and you're like whoa what then you go back to your cubicle people out about really intelligent people or scientists or someone who talks about anything And if that's how you interact with people, why would anyone want to be that?

3:35 And, you know, after the breakup, You were psychologically scarred. Right, right, right. and his girlfriend is not interested in him. Whatever it takes to stimulate and inspire. It's like he's quoting all these reasons and, here, you're an astrophysicist. I said to me. And I hear you're an astrophysicist. Yeah. That's all. Well, I'm sure some people did go nutty and set up shelters in the desert and go underground and all that.

7:01 That doesn't work because you can't gain adherence to your cult that you're building. To think that way, I don't understand what's going on in those minds. And he said they were so far away from doing it that the fact that they did it, It's to the moon and back. Yes, it was hard, certainly. Oh, well, you fake news stories. That and visual stuff. delicious it makes it even more conspiratorial attractive um and then the fact that the the rock

10:06 you should be able to question it and someone would Did you ever read Clinton's quote? What was it? His opinion is equally valid, by the way. Well, while you're looking at it, that they can't believe it. that was in the shit that I saw, whether it was Clinton quote, this fucks with me. weren't. Back then, I thought he was a crank. than they actually ever deserve.

13:02 That's the other thing that makes a conspiracy so juicy, in the absence of actual data. The reason why the moon theory is so juicy for people You don't see stars in the daytime on Earth, not because they're not there, and there's Neil and Buzz and the lander, is too short to take in the dim light And so what that told me was that people simply wanted to believe that it was a hoax.

16:19 exploiting your ignorance of the laws of physics for their own financial gain. So I see science literacy as a kind of vaccine against all of the world around you Right. you know, and using And then talking to this dude's uncle, or him telling me what his uncle said, actually, Just think about this. Three. Lemony Snicket, who said, Sure, but really delectable secrets

19:07 So you don't think that anybody's capable of keeping secrets? Wait, wait, wait. if the secret is really juicy and really, really tantalizing, Yeah. The statement, most secrets get out. Well, the idea is that if you're talking about NASA, in 2001 and how and then he showed all the evidence of And so I want you to, Brian, pull up astronauts on trampolines.

21:40 And that they're moving behind the lunar rover. We were going to a bunch of exercise that we had made up as the Lunar Olympics. About 4 feet. I mean, obviously, Is that really the moon? Doesn't that look weird to you? So there are other people who take them on head to head. Like Michael Shermer, big skeptic. you otherwise knew the surface of the moon.

25:04 After you get to a certain point, the idea proposed in the Kubrick documentary other thing go but they just but they they needed a movie director to help out the the view well The fucking guy really did spacewalk. yeah so you see something oh it's completely straight But, you know, I'd want to see more. So I want to see if dust was kicked up. And suspend the dust and have it descend as slowly as an astronaut bouncing dust.

27:33 This is the one where it looks like the guy gets yanked up by a wire. would have to wrap their heads around, I guess, You're packing it in there, huh? So you have muscles to accommodate your 190-pound body. Okay Right. They'd laugh at you. You could spring better because the cord has to make you feel like you're 70 pounds, You know, we have an idea in our head

30:31 Is there anything? Right. Pull that up. Yeah, there's a shaft through the top of the flag. by it, and when he hops by it, it wiggles in the breeze. Now he's sort of moving along, and he gets in front of it, Right. It would have been much better So now it's wiggling. Here it goes. It looks like a breeze blew it. It could have easily been that some of the footage didn't come out well, or they faked some of the footage, or that was faked.

34:02 All right? around the flag, that you don't have full information. And that's all. cueing. But look, the thing's in the ground I just wanted you to look at a guy hopping in front of a flag Yeah, not only that, You can't put, the sun, for all intents and purposes in a photograph, is at infinity. I pretend. With me, With you, if they film one part Right. So they fake the sun in a sound studio, and they have the right color temperature of the

37:46 And this has sort of been kind of acknowledged by NASA that they rolled the dice with solar radiation. Yeah, it's time exposure to it. Yeah. I mean, space station is two something. Hubble is a within, what, 400 miles? Easily, yeah. they're not right, because Van Allen says it's safe to go through the belts. And then they went is easier, cheaper, and faster to reproduce today.

39:41 was the assumption that the future would be one big computer controlling the one big ship. The argument is that the manned spaceflight is the only thing that hasn't advanced. I'll tell you why. And it was this grand mission from NASA, a civilian space agency. simply the next technological thing to do, that when we learn that Russia is not going to the

42:27 I would argue that that's a nice, convenient thing to say, but the reality is we still kept up as far as other avenues of military, Right. We weren't the first humans in space. That era in our memory Once you understand that, it allows you to understand why we stopped. Look at him with his tricky Unless one of two conditions are satisfied. Another way, we find some economic justification for doing it.

44:49 Terraforming? God damn. All right? Platinum is heavy. You now have asteroids made of crust and asteroids made of core material. Or you corral the asteroid Man deep space travel or robotic? They don't want to come home after that. because you're on that thing for like nine months, You can't have that. And one of them is what's in your pencils, the graphite.

48:22 as you touch the pencil to the page and drag it, That's what's going on inside what we call the lead pencil. The shell of a sphere. geodesic dome? Yes. He's credited with inventing it, but he didn't. You know, do we have any round ceilings? That's amazing. And one of them is diamond. it's radiant on your finger. some sort of technology Oh, yeah. and went out to 47th Street in New York,

52:55 Why? Exactly. Fuck yeah. Does it freak you out when, I'm concerned about all the places where that's happening. When I think of technology, I think of Getting back to what started this, carbon is the fourth most, And I don't have that map memorized in my head. You can make one in about a week. They make one, Jay-Z type rock? Doesn't De Beers have, like, the rumor is the conspiracy theory is?

56:51 that time. And it presupposes that there's full access to supplies and demand and nothing is including sources of energy, chemical energy in that case, company is doing exactly that they're targeting resources they they they're targeting asteroids For war. Oh. But I think that's in space, a flag on it, and no private objects Jews in their marketplace

1:00:05 conspiracy theory to keep the chemtrails, but certainly crop circles. Everybody knows There's something, there's validity to it, unfortunately, in that, first of all, cloud seeding has been done in many cultures. It's done on a regular open basis in the United Arab Emirates. control the populace through uh yeah how spring what is it telling what is how in what way is it

1:01:34 are. So then I talked to a pilot and I said, okay, That's all I need to know. And then it cools, reaching the temperature of the surrounding air, and then it condenses out. They want it to be cancer-causing things that the government is spraying on us in order to lower the population numbers because there's too many of us. I'm like, Stop freaking me out.

1:03:22 and they were convinced Like, Yellowstone, every 6,000 to 800,000 years, essentially kills half the continent off. Well, he held it together for a long time. And it was over like a six-month period or something like that. You got new knees or new hips? that's like 4.5 on the Richter scale. And it was about like the A train going 30 miles an hour just below your feet.

1:05:38 And then you talk about it. Yeah, well, some places are more geologically active than others. Places that are geologically scaled up into a catastrophe scenario that feeds people's fears No, I don't know the number, but it's dead. Not all of it has been bulldozed over to put skyscrapers. volcano, essentially what it is is a volcano that when it blows, it leaves almost like a crater. It leaves like a gigantic,

1:08:49 You pull it out of the liquefied layers of the planet and put it on the surface. that maybe there's water there and if there's water there and so there's there are regions than adjacent areas Unlike the moon, where the last time it Caught it. smaller but still significant chunks of comet material. it plunged with more energy than the impact And my other point was that when you see that,

1:12:25 Or whether, you know, that space and time, because they fall so far beyond anything we've been trained to think about. That's a ridiculous way to live. Yeah, and not even that. Calendar months. gurgling up. They're boiling up through the center, and it keeps keeps regenerating and rain is coming out the bottom. Right. And that's just when you see the

1:16:01 If I say a killer asteroid is going to come every 100 million years, What happens after a hurricane devastates a coastline? So it's a good thing that we have methods and tools that can compensate for this shortcoming. You can do the engineering, Is there a Sylvester Stallone approach? And we're less good at knowing where the pieces land afterwards.

1:18:05 But really, you put a space pod out there that has a gravitational field that attracts Well, you'd have the asteroid protection force. Because their orbits don't reach Jupiter for enough to Jupiter to bat it into a new place. It was our urge, given what's called the Copernican principle, to say that we're not special, we're average. jupiter-sized object much closer to their host star than our jupiter is so then we say well wait

1:20:40 We're now building the catalogs That's the challenge. And in fact, data are now showing that interstellar space may have more rogue planets that have been ejected for having misbehaved orbits from their star system So, we also know that many planets have still retained their heat of formation long after they've come into existence. But we've got an energy source.

1:22:58 the ocean that is releasing the heat from below. And it's an energy source. It's at the bottom of the ocean where the sun places that would kill us. life. And the fact that we're focusing our search on planets around stars may simply be limiting you can use infrared telescopes that might pick them up, Because if your residue in an orbit where a red-blooded planet exists,

1:25:47 but it is the ratio of the mass of the stuff we plow into to Earth's mass Pluto has not. you're so far from the sun, So it's possible you can have a big object well beyond the Kuiper Belt. Okay, now that suggested that perhaps they were episodic or periodic. I haven't kept up with that. We lost 70% of the world's life the world. We had a fucked up environment.

1:29:18 ecological niche, we can then And if that's the case, no, it doesn't hit us. A further analysis of the fossil record doesn't actually hold up this cyclical extinction pattern. Yeah, that's a swarm of comets, not quite halfway to the nearest star, but very far out there. okay, four times as big as Jupiter, Is there's something you need to explain here on Earth.

1:32:02 And those that Jupiter doesn't bat away away like batting practice, those that that could be true to explain Let someone write a good sci-fi story on it. that may or may not exist. And so to say I need your creativity to keep your life interesting, no. because we're fascinated by shit that's unproven mysterious shit look i got a broken brain okay know what. We're pretty sure it sunk down beneath the surface in a kind of permafrost. My point is,

1:35:25 civilization. planet and they will then fall and land on its surface if mars was fertile and formed life, microbial though it may only have been, it's microbial life that can We have life forms that can survive what that trip through space would have – what a trip through space would have – what it would have been subjected to by a trip through space. So you have an... Now, by the way, life does not evolve the way anyone typically thinks it does.

1:37:55 for that next assault in the environment. our vessel that we call our bodies and right on down to microorganisms. So the entropy laws work against you to make life. So your point is that it's possible that organisms could be growing even on asteroids then. you know... But don't they have some air down there? So, that haven't over the billions of years completely been filled in. When I say huge, I mean, you know, hundreds of miles large.

1:41:32 And he was a polymath. because we get rain out of our atmosphere. If it has rain, it must have oceans. If it has oceans, Or even have the same number of senses as us. We make great art. If someone farted in front of you, you would have no idea that this terrible gas is you're inhaling. No, no, I'll tell you why. no pun intended, Regarding your fart theory.

1:44:44 It's a legitimate hypothesis. Thank you. It's out on the table. Now, here you go. You ready totally getting peer-reviewed. It's the right thing to call it, too. It's a legitimate hypothesis. It's one of the most lethal gases that exists. and let's smell more of it. where oxygen doesn't exist. The microbes that thrive down there, they are anaerobic,

1:46:49 There no fish there wouldn't be any fishes down there if the ocean currents stopped If you were alive at the time we wouldn't have noticed hydrogen sulfide, and humans would not have survived it, that just like the sense of smell, fart theory. Yes, I'm not saying baby and everybody else is dead outside Right, exactly. Well, I'm definitely not right.

1:49:37 fool us, they, and occasionally don't work, they're not all that the universe tells us. actually late 1500s, you had the invention of the microscope That was something that previously can sit in an MRI chamber and sit there and whistle Dixie, and you'll have no idea the for one aspect of the electromagnetic spectrum. We have access to some of that, and we call that, for obvious reasons, visible light.

1:52:52 sideburns. I don't know if you... And you'd think twice about going to the beach because that's the stuff that gives you skin cancer, especially people with lighter skin. So science has broadened our senses and given us senses that our human biology could not have even thought of or invented. These are the extremes of our measurements of nature today.

1:54:55 That doesn't mean some people don't have some creative ideas, The multiverse. altered from ours, and it would expand but it's infinite and self-comprised. the charge on the electron, the mass of the neutron, if any of these are slightly different, then everything that holds you together, all the physical laws that come together to make you, including all the forces of nature, they would just completely collapse in the existence

1:57:19 So that's why I joke about this half seriously, Yeah, well, they might have hover glide or something. Yeah. When you point that finger, I get nervous. many other planets. Well, the sun is... Right, right. well that just continues to push the question a little deeply if the universe never makes if the turtles all the way down, as they say. We look at the sun.

2:00:36 And we're seeing some that don't exist anymore that's insane. Stars that explode. light years away they exploded a 1,000 years ago. we, you know, there's the old military credo, trust but verify. what would happen to you if you're exposed to but we'll give the comics the the the scientific of the publication of that paper and these are the biggest explosions known in the universe,

2:03:36 That's it. In the entire universe. The ozone absorbs high-energy radiation. It took the ultraviolet light out of the picture. the O3's it protects us from some of it, form of chemistry we know and so we would not survive that that would be an extinction uh Or whatever. And then there are people who are saying, They did it on... The environment and the oceans and the atmosphere.

2:08:04 If you have the power of geoengineering, we're going to figure out how to get energy from pollution you had to draw it. never figured out how to send a satellite signal who the fuck even understands what's going on when Well, that's the challenge. We could probably figure out some way. It seems to me that if you fly over just the United States alone, God, there's a lot of space to do shit.

2:10:41 Well, I didn't read the full depth of the article, In any time that civilization has been concerned about this. There was a day when Earth And there's good evidence to say that Earth had... I forgot the exact time that they've been... the tracking... That's way worse, right? they melt and they create water and the water and the energy And so you heat, and when you heat something, it outgasses, right?

2:14:21 And so you can imagine a situation where you have a runaway greenhouse That's another problem here. Much like your analogy of the clouds in a time-lapse fashion, the idea of living by the beach would be so fucking ridiculous on river mouths where transportation was useful in the days before railroads. Because if you plan for the end of the world, that's recently been discovered.

2:16:56 What bottle of wine do you have that you're going to pull out first to know this. It's his calculation I'm trying to remember what the scientist's name that was talking to you about the discovery of computer... And I don't claim expertise in everything he said. They usually see the perfectly written paper and the news report on it that is a particular kind of error-checking algorithm

2:19:56 you know, you're looking at sort of the gross thing you can check for. You know, how many I'm interrogating him And if they come out with a consensus and they agree, then I'm good to go. And I'll invest more energy in coming to understand it. It's great fodder for conversation when you think you're being deep. The computer simulation theory has been bandied about in a bunch of different forms and the idea being that one day we'll have infinite amounts of processing power and we will be able to create a reality that is indiscernible from this reality and once that is done how will we know when we're in it

2:22:54 power and our storage power for if we can now just simulate it? They can suck it. Blue cigarettes. of intelligent life the stills and all of the you want to become a dumber person i can show you i can make you No, I mean, it's a... And there was a guy today who sent me this message about he's an engineer. because I know it's within us all, And I really appreciate your humility in that respect.

2:26:13 We are creating the next generation Cosmos. It's going to be another... But it's going to air on Fox. with him. He's a fan of Cosmos Smoking aliens. And then three months later, there was an episode where Stewie went back to the Big Bang hey man, yeah, the guy who hosts the UFC I really, really appreciate it. Thanks, everybody, for all the messages on Twitter and Facebook and all the various comedy shows.

2:28:32 That's what I heard. brian red band empire and uh go there and you can buy one of those cool cat t-shirts and you can also find out what only on Death Squad on iTunes. We'll see you soon.