Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson - Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilisation

Full transcript: Neil deGrasse Tyson on London Real

3:08 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist, planetary scientist and author for the last 30 years. You’ve dedicated your life to popularizing science in the mainstream media, and are considered to be America’s best known scientist. You have served as director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City since 1996.

3:30 You’ve been awarded 21 honorary doctorates, the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences, and the Distinguished Public Service Medal from NASA, plus asteroid 13123 Tyson is named after you. You’ve written 20 books, and your latest Starry Messenger is a wake-up call for civilization, where you explore the state of the modern world from your own unique cosmic perspective, and through the rational lens of science you believe we can address many of the issues facing the world, take accountability for our actions, and serve the greater good with a better understanding of our place in the universe. Neil, welcome back to London Real.

4:09 Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. If I can make one, a one or one and a half adjustments on that. Very flattering intro you offered me there. So one of them is, in case anyone was wondering, that asteroid with my name on it is a main belt asteroid so its orbit does not cross Earth’s orbit.

4:28 There’s no risk. You don’t want the asteroid with your name on it to be the one that takes out the human species Second, that the planetary scientist part of the ID there, that was on my Wiki page that someone had put in that was never true. I’m just a pure astrophysicist, and that’s since been removed duly removed. So I just want to update what you’ve got going there. I appreciate that.

4:52 Yeah, never trust Wikipedia always check it. That’s for sure. You know, nine years ago you were actually on London Real when you were in town promoting Cosmos, which was your new series, I think on Discovery Channel, and I remember I went to a hotel room and I set up like five different cameras, and we had an incredible conversation, and afterwards as we took the picture you put me in a headlock, and that picture got immortalized in my TED Talk, and I actually just saw some copy that I wrote about you, and I gotta read it back to you, because this was my first impression of you I went, quote, Neil deGrasse Tyson is, well, a dude dressed in cowboy boots and an embroidered shirt.

5:30 He represents the essence of ultra cool nerdiness. Neil trained as a wrestler in high school and soon became the self-appointed defender of the geeks. Now one could easily argue he is their de facto leader. And that’s what I wrote. Do you remember where you put some of that in context?

5:49 I think a lot of kids or at least in my generation, you read comic books with superheroes, and you kind of imagine yourself as a superhero and you might wonder what kind of superhero would you be, what would be your powers, and I grew up a geek, and I, at the time, before geeks ruled the world, which we kind of do today, because we invent computers and things like that, but before that it happened. Geeks were totally pummeled by bullies, right? We’re getting wedgied in the locker room, this sort of thing, and I was very physically able and physically fit, so I was a geek who could, if I wanted to, also kick your ass.

6:33 So I imagine myself as a geek defender, where, you know, if there was a geek in trouble, you would send up digits of pi into the clouds, right, like the Bat Signal, and the more digits, the more serious the offense was, and I would just come running and save the day. Did I imagine this in my own mind when I was a kid? Well, I wish you’d been at my school, because I was a I was a proper science geek, Neil. I spent many, many weeks at, actually, the San Diego Science Fair, where I went.

7:06 I went to school in San Diego, and the science fair in San Diego was a big deal, and I went like three or four years in a row, and the later I went to the California State Science Fair, but I was the kid that was, you know, a program in Fortran when he was 13, and I loved the science lab, and you know, I actually would go to the planetarium at, I think it’s been renamed the Fleet Science Center at Balboa Park in San Diego, and this is back, must have been in the late ’70s, Neil, and I remember this hemisphere. I guess it was like a 180-degree piece, where they would have these shows on, and when I was reading your book Starry Messenger, you were talking about how, I think, when you went to the Hayden Planetarium, I mean, when you were a kid you were like immediately transformed into another world, coming from maybe New York City, and you knew you wanted to do that I have fond memories as a child, being like, it was just a pattern interrupt that nothing else did.

8:00 It, the cinema didn’t. Obviously there were no computers or internet back then, but maybe you can tell me about your experience and how powerful is it when people see what you call the original metaverse over their eyes, either out in the wild or actually in a planetarium like that? It really does change people, doesn’t it? Yeah, so in my case it led to my career, but I think every one of us, a dare I assert this but I think it’s almost completely true that every one of us remembers our first time in a planetarium experience, because of how immersive it is, and how, you know, think about it.

8:39 You’re more likely to remember something if multiple senses are engaged and you’re completely engulfed by it, right? Whatever it is that’s happening, that will be more likely to be remembered, and planetariums do that. So I think I can assert that, and it’s probably true for most people if not everyone. For me it was true enough where I convinced, like, as I’ve said this before, that I think the universe chose me. I was nine years old, and I I didn’t know what the night sky was supposed to look like.

9:12 I grew up in the Bronx, New York, whether you know six or nine stars in the night sky, and then the planetarium dome they dim the lights and the stars come out, and I originally thought it was a hoax, but nice hoax, but nothing real. Of course that’s not real. I would only later see the night sky in all of its majesty, and to this day, and I’m an old man now, but to this day I go to mountaintops, the most beautiful vistas in the world, to access the universe, and I look up and I see the countless stars, and I say to myself, wow that reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium.

9:54 You know, it’s a, it’s, I don’t know if that’s a sad fact or a beautiful fact, but it’s an evidence of how imprinted I was by that first artificially projected experience. Yeah, well, I remember mine distinctively, and look, I’ve been in London now for the last 20 years, and I I think I see one star, maybe, on a good night. Because we just don’t have much of a starscape here, but I distinctly remember a trip I took to Botswana and not expecting them. I knew I was going to see some giraffes and maybe some lions, but we were way out in the middle of nowhere, and to see the stars at night, there was just, like, oh my gosh, wow.

10:34 This is what maybe my ancestors would look at back in the day, and they might have even taken it for granted. That’s right. Every night, you know, they weren’t distracted by HBO or, you know, any kind of streaming services. When it got dark, it got dark, and what else could you do but look up and look at how rich the storytelling is that lives among the stars and the constellations and and the movement of the sun, moon and planets. So the sky was our tapestry of storytelling, and for that reason I think it goes very deep within us.

11:09 There’s some hypothesis, I didn’t verify this with anthropologists, but it’s interesting to hypothesize that humans, among all animals, were actually quite comfortable sleeping on our backs. There aren’t many animals at all, certainly not mammals that will do that, and we sleep at night. So if you are sleeping on your back at night and you happen to wake up and open your eyes, you see the night sky. A turtle goes to sleep, opens its eye, wakes up and opens its eyes.

11:45 It sees the ground. So do ants, so do beetles, so do birds, you know. And so our curiosity with the night sky may go way deeper than just some modern fascination now that we have tools to access it. That’s an excellent, I’ve never heard of that thought and theory. That’s a good point.

12:03 And also, one thing I learned when I was out in Africa is that everybody’s awake at night. Like, the freaks come out at night, and that’s when all the sounds are happening, and that’s what it’s dangerous there. Yeah, not all creatures are daytime creatures, right? One thing I want to sort of nip in the bud. There are many people who visit the Southern Hemisphere.

12:24 They go into the Outback of Australia. You were in desolate areas, in Africa, and they look up and they say, oh my gosh, the sky in the Southern Hemisphere is so amazing, and they get jealous, and I’m saying, no, that’s not how this works. 90% of the human population lives north of the equator, and most of that population lives in cities where there’s light pollution and air pollution and tall buildings, and we don’t have a relationship with the night sky.

13:01 So now I put you into the Southern Hemisphere. We’re only 10 or 15 percent of our population lives, and you look up and there’s no light pollution, and you think it’s an inherently better sky but it’s not all the sky is great. We’ve just been deprived of it. I’ve been having to live in the hemisphere where most of the light-generating civilization is located. Okay, very well said.

13:24 And you believe that it’s maybe one of the few things that can ultimately unite everyone in the world. It’s like something we have in common. It’s something that maybe causes primal feelings. It’s something that can show us maybe what we really are. It shows us what’s out there.

13:41 It can show us how small we are. Is that a little bit of kind of what this book is about, or some of the thoughts? Yeah, I don’t know if I want to say I believe it so much that I think it. Yeah, I guess believe is the right word, but I think the universe and a cosmic perspective has the power to achieve that end, and why? Because when you step out of yourself and ascend, not just to get a stratospheric view, because that’s the common phrasing when you want to think that way, but we can go a step further and say, what do we look like from the Moon, get a genuine cosmic perspective?

14:20 And one of the tropes I invoke, were the chapters of the book, is what would we look like to aliens who have no preconceived notion of who and what we are, or what we, or how we view ourselves? And they come upon Earth, and that maybe it’s in their tourist guide. Oh, there’s an Earth, it’s got water and biodiversity. Let’s take a look, and they go down to Earth, and they approach Earth, and they see mountains, oceans, land masses, clouds, as nature intends you to see Earth, and then they get closer, and they look in classroom windows, and they see Earth globes in the back of the room that are color-coded, and they say, I wonder what that’s about.

15:08 Oh, I know what it’s about. We have demarcated our land masses, our contiguous land masses, to know who your enemies are and who your friends are. Yeah, it was on the premise that, oh, this is geography. Well, no. It’s the carving up of land masses that humans have done the consequence of which, over time and over history, has been warfare, bloodshed.

15:34 What side of a line in the sand do you live on? Were you born on? Who do you worship? Who do you sleep with? How reflective to sunlight is your skin color?

15:46 We find always to divide and conquer ourselves, and this, this would look wholly alien to aliens, if I can assure you of that, and I’m guessing they would just phone home and say, there’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth. Well, I guess even before they got close, they would probably see that, you know, that famous picture of North and South Korea, right, where it’s like there’s light on one side and there’s no light on the other. And I was just looking at a map, and I saw, like, the border of, like, U.S. and Mexico, and it’s just it is quite strange to see this straight line in a world of no straight lines, where there’s such a difference between these two areas.

16:31 Yeah, exactly. So, in a part portion of the book I identify places where you can, at night, where you can detect boundaries between countries, because normally those are just, uh, they’re on your school room globe, but yes, between North and South Korea at night. South Korea is lit, lit with civilization, and North Korea is dark, and so there’s a geopolitical boundary visible from space. There’s another one visible from the daytime, which is between Israel and surrounding regions.

17:08 The fascinating reality there, uh, that that boundary can be identified because Israel irrigates. It’s basically desert climate throughout Israel irrigates right across the border. They do not. So you see this green dust, this boundary between what is green and what is sort of dusty brown, and so, but then you look at the GDP per capita difference between across those borders there, and in Korea, it’s a factor of 10. Right, so we have evidence of economic disparity visible from space.

17:47 That’s extraordinary. What’s going on? Aren’t we all the same species? Isn’t it? Um, and I would have thought that when COVID came around, I tweeted.

17:58 I was early. I was early out of the box, March 7th, maybe March 6th, I tweeted, um, the coronavirus is like an invading alien species it doesn’t care what side of those lines in the sand you were born on. It only cares that you are human, and it is an enemy of us all, and it will require invocations of the methods and tools of science to combat it, and not magical thinking. And so I keep thinking to myself, a common enemy to our entire species would be the most potent force for us to bind together to fight a common enemy.

18:40 But there was the coronavirus, and that’s not what happened, and I was very disappointed in us as a species about that. In fact, it seems to divide us even more. Yeah, it’s true. I mean, we’ve always seen those great Hollywood movies like Independence Day, where we come together when there’s that alien threat. So you kind of hope, you hope that we would, but yeah, I guess we kind of didn’t.

19:00 In that case, you know, I’ve been having these conversations, you know, for 11 years, and you know, with some of my greatest guests on this show, after talking for two, two and a half hours, they almost always come to a conclusion that you came in the book, which is this simple statement of “We Are All One.” And it’s fascinating to me. I never saw this coming when I started broadcasting, and it could be a bodybuilder, you could be a scientist, an activist, an author, or whatever, and oftentimes it comes to the end of it and they say, you know what, before I go, I just think we need to remember we’re all one.

19:34 Yeah, in the chapter called Body and Mind, I explore how much effort we put in to make ourselves look different not only from one another but from what we might natively look like. I mean, look at, look at what goes on people with straight hair will curl it. People with curly hair will straighten it. People with dark hair will lighten it. People’s light hair will darken it.

20:01 Your muscles aren’t big enough, you go to the fitness center. Your other body parts, you get surgically, and so again, what would an alien think if they see us doing this? Look at look at the beauty industrial complex and what power they have over what we look like to ourselves. The alien would probably say, my gosh, these humans think that they are ugly beyond repair given how much effort they are putting in to change what they look like right when they wake up in the morning, and that’s a cosmic perspective on our conduct that I think can offer some insights into, like, what are you doing and why?

20:45 Have you really thought about it? Yeah, or are you just part of a system with no sense of what’s driving it. You’re just in the masses doing what you’re told by others, even if you’re not conscious of it. These are outlooks, by the way. Why am I an astrophysicist talking about any of that?

21:05 Because that’s what it looks like when you’re scientifically literate. When you’re scientifically literate, you step back and say, well, why is it that way? You ask questions because you’re curious about the engines of what’s happening and other drivers and forces, be they hidden or obvious, and so you arrive at these perspectives and these conclusions that you wouldn’t otherwise see or know. Yeah, and you could take that a step further and look at what we’re doing with augmented reality and virtual reality.

21:38 I mean, if you look at almost any social media platform now, sometimes there’s AR built in that you don’t even know about. You know, even Zoom has, like, you know, the touch-up feature, and you find yourself, you’re like, oh, I prefer Zoom over this Microsoft Teams thing, and it’s like, yeah, it’s because like you’re in real time, your appearance is changing. So yeah. Um, and I like how you keep looking at things from the perspective of aliens. I’m curious because in the book you talk about this concept of an overview effect, and we’ve been fortunate to have Chris Hadfield here, who spent two or three hundred days orbiting the Earth, taking pictures and actually tweeting them back in the day.

22:15 And then Terry Virts as well, and they both mentioned that seeing the Earth from up there made them think differently. I think you open up the book with a quote from an astronaut who looked down on the Earth. What does that mean? The overview effect is that a bit like aliens see this, or is it a lesser version, actually, of what an alien would notice? So an overview effect, as it has come to be called, is the perspective that astronauts bring back to Earth for having seen Earth from orbit.

22:46 And so that’s an overview. All right, so that’s, uh, above the stratosphere. Yes, and that, however, the opening quote of the book from, uh, astronaut Edgar Mitchell, that’s bigger than an overview effect, because he’s commenting on what Earth looks like from the Moon. Yeah, and there’s a very big difference between low Earth orbit, where almost all astronauts who report this experience are reporting from, and the how many 12 astronauts who have been to the Moon, and so, uh, Edgar, I can quote him.

23:29 It’s, it’s indelibly etched in my brain. It goes like this: you, you develop an instant um, you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it from out there on the Moon. International politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter million miles out and say, look at that, you son of a it was like, whoa, whoa, how important were those images beaming back from that first expedition to the Moon, where you could literally see, like you said, not an overview Earth, but the Earth is like a little finger.

24:20 Yeah, your thumb could blot it out. Correct. I think in Apollo 11, in the movie that Ron Howard did, there’s a point where he’s actually doing that. One of the actors, and that’s very different, isn’t it, from being the overview? Because you see you can’t do it if you’re orbiting Earth.

24:36 You can’t blot out Earth with your thumb. Yeah, that’s correct. It’s everything. You’re too close. In fact, I can quantify how close they were, analogize how close you are to Earth when you are in Earth orbit.

24:47 So if you, again, let’s go back to our school room globe, and you can ask, well, how high is the orbiting space station and the shuttle and all the places that they’ve gone, relative to a school room globe? And they went about about 3/8, about a centimeter above Earth’s surface. Okay, that’s about how high they were orbiting. When we look at the oh, they’re out in space, and people ask me, do you, you’re an astrophysicist, do you want to go into space? And they mean like Earth’s orbit.

25:19 It’s like, no, that’s not far enough. Okay. That I’m sorry, by the way, what’s the distance from London to Glasgow, approximately? Oh, in like miles or kilometers, or either? Yeah.

25:33 It’s like probably a six-hour train ride. It’s probably 200 miles, 240 miles, something like that. Yeah, yeah. So that’s about how far, from that distance, put it vertically up, and that’s how high above Earth they are. So, yes, the overview effect is important, and it is deeply moving, and astronauts have been brought to tears reflecting on this.

25:54 But when you go to the Moon, that’s when you see Earth as this lone orb adrift in the darkness of space, with, as Carl Sagan had said, no hint that help is going to come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves, as he wrote so poetically in Pale Blue Dot, uh, his book reflecting on what it means to see Earth from a distance. Now, you, you ask, how did it change us? So the first image of Earth from the Moon came back in 1968, Apollo 8, right? And that’s the famous Earthrise photo, where this Earth on the lunar horizon.

26:36 That’s a flip for you, right there, in perspective. And what, for me, what matters there is, um, this has been said many different ways. I will repeat it here, that we journeyed to the Moon to explore the Moon, and we look back over our shoulders and discovered Earth for the first time. All major legislation related to the modern environmental movement occurred while we were on the Moon, while Earth was visible to us from deep space. In the United States, and I would check some other, uh, resident countries, when I looked at the historical record, the United States did much of this first.

27:25 In 1970, we’re going to the Moon, we founded the Environmental Protection Agency, which immediately then banned lead from the environment. Right, these are things we were thinking, not just locally: clean up my stream because there’s pollution. We took a step back and said, oh my gosh, we’re all in this together. The Earth Day, the first Earth Day, was 1970. Why wasn’t it 1960 or 1980?

27:54 It was. We could have had in 1960 people were thinking about Earth then, weren’t we? A little bit. Okay, but no, it happened in 1970. Uh, and this, all, man, I have a whole list in the book.

28:06 The list is there. The point is, you can’t put a dollar value on this change in consciousness. It’s like a firmware upgrade to how we see and think about the world. In the United States, there’s a very famous, perhaps one of the most, one of the most famous public service announcements on television, and it was an American Indian in full headdress, who observes people throwing trash out the window on a freeway after he gets out of his canoe from a river on the side, and the trash falls at his feet, and he turns his head.

28:46 The commercial is 10 seconds long, 15 seconds long, turns his head, and there’s a tear coming down his cheek. I remember, anyone around remembers that commercial. Yeah. When did that commercial air? 1970, 1971.

29:00 At the same time, and by the way, we’ve been throwing trash out the window long before 1970. So one could have done that, but we didn’t. Oh, by the way, that actor was an Italian American, who has Italian ancestry. Back then, you could do that. Yeah, right, portraying a Native American.

29:24 But so I cannot overstate the value of the cosmic perspective as it was brought to us from the Apollo era, and all I try to do in this book is broaden the meaning of a cosmic perspective to so many other sectors in our lives. My brother was born the day of the Moon landing. On the 16th, uh, no, the day the rocket took off, on the 16th of July, and they were bringing him home from the hospital four days later. They my parents pulled in the garage, and they were listening on the radio to the Moon landing, and they couldn’t, they couldn’t leave the car.

30:02 They were going to miss it, so they stayed in the car, listened to the radio on the 20th of July. So, yeah, baby, what’s his name? Does he have a lunar name? Eric, whatever. They didn’t get that creative.

30:13 So, oh no, that’s too bad. So that was a very important moment in history that people didn’t see coming, but when they saw the Earth from that perspective, it somehow may be subconsciously changed the human species. That’s why I referenced it as a firmware upgrade. Yeah, you know a firmware, in the deepest level of the software, it affects everything that unfolds beyond it, and if you asked people, well, why did you start Earth Day in 1970? Well, it feels like a good idea.

30:44 I think they’re not probably consciously thinking that they had just seen Earth from space. So that’s why I referenced it as a firmware upgrade, rather than as a force that sort of explicitly hitting people on the head. It was more subtle than that. Yeah, it’s interesting how, um, when you travel to a different country, you learn things about yourself, and sometimes when you meditate and get out of your own immediate consciousness, you can see your own actions.

31:14 Yeah, in a fresh light. That’s correct. Yeah, and um, if it’s what you expected, fine, but if it’s not, it’s a, you’ve empowered yourself to do something about it, having known what the causes and effects are of those influences. You you tell the book, Starry Messenger, which I guess is the English translation of Galileo’s original book, and he wrote a book at the time that was scientifically correct and factual, but that went against the grain of what was culturally accepted from all the power structures, which is kind of the essence of what you’re all about.

31:51 I think, let’s, you know, let’s look at the science and learn from that. Can you talk about the significance of naming that, and how you see that Galileo’s book and what happened at that time? Yeah, so just, uh, just so that we’re all on the same page, around 1600, two remarkable things happened: the microscope, and the compound microscope, the the modern variant of a microscope, uh, rather than just a magnifying glass, the compound microscope, and the telescope were both invented within a decade of each other in the early 1600s, both by Dutch optical manufacturers.

32:32 The Dutch had perfected optics long before anybody else did, so it’s not a surprise that those two inventions came out of the Netherlands. So Galileo, upon hearing of this, said, that’s a brilliant idea. I’ll make one of these on my own, and so he made the best existing telescope in the world at the time. By the way, the name of it was not telescope. There was something Latin, which means spyglass, which is an indication of how people were using it.

33:05 Right, uh, it was not, I don’t think it was considered a scientific, uh, bulwark. Isn’t tech always going through that window? Isn’t tech always used in nefarious means? The first iteration of tech. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

33:19 So he invents one, and he then shows it to the Doge of Venice and says, with this new device, he goes to the clock tower, the high tower in the, in the plaza, uh, in the Piazza, and he shows the Doge of Venice that you can identify whether a ship in the harbor is friend or foe, nearly 10 times farther away than you can with your naked eye, thereby giving you that much more time to prepare if you see that you’re about to be invaded. And so the Doge ordered up, I forgot how many, a dozen telescopes, some, but some number of telescopes, where he was then financially stabled, and he says, okay, this is good. Now I can look up into the universe, which is what he did.

34:17 And you had to think that that was something to do. Why would you think looking at the sky with this, a piece of equipment, would bring you any different information than your eyes would? Same with a microscope. Why aren’t your eyes just seeing everything that’s seeable? Why would God make you an organism without the capacity to know things that are going on right in front of you?

34:44 When Antonie van Leeuwenhoek showed Drew what he saw in pond water the idea. What kind of audacity is that? He invents a microscope and said, Gee, I’m going to look at a drop of pond water. Why would you even think to do that? That’s part of the brilliance of being a brilliant scientist.

35:03 To any of the rest of us, it’s just water. It’s transparent. You’re wasting your time. He looks in it, and he sees countless what he called “animalcules,” cutest word ever, a prittly, a swimming in this drop. These are paramecia, amoeba, all these things, and he writes to the, to the, to his colleagues in London, okay, the, the clearinghouse for scientific discoveries we sort of freshly conceived as a place where Scientists would exchange ideas.

35:39 He writes and tells them. They write back and say, okay, next time, make your observations before you drink your gin and then tell us. So they didn’t believe it. Why would you believe that? My gosh.

35:54 Okay, so the skepticism was real, but in science, you check it out. And so in fact they visited him and they saw it, and they can make one of their own. Oh my gosh, uh, biology, microbiology was off to a start with the telescope. Galileo, uh, sees that Venus has phases like the Moon. He sees that Jupiter has what he calls Jovian stars.

36:23 The, well, I would think that planets would have moons around them. This is not something that’s not a thought, but he saw that Jupiter had these little dots of light, and as Jupiter moved against the background stars, they moved with it. So they were attached somehow, and he followed them and noticed that they orbited Jupiter. It was the first time anybody saw that Earth was not the center of all motion. And so he viewed these as messages from the stars.

36:53 Starry Messenger. It’s so, so, I was moved by that. By the way, in Latin it’s Sidereus Nuncius. I was moved by that, and I wanted to continue that tradition of seeing what other messages can we get from the universe. Starry messages, now that we have the levels of the technology and knowledge and wisdom that is 400 years advanced beyond Galileo, hence the title of the book.

37:23 That’s my long answer to your simple question. Starry Messenger, cosmic perspectives on civilization. That’s a beautiful answer. You know, I, you just mentioned 10 years, you get the microscope and the telescope, and Neil, everyone’s always talking about how this is the, the, the exponential growth in technology with the internet and the mobile phone, and now AI, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, but I mean for that period of time, was that not equally as disruptive technology that changed the culture of the Earth?

37:51 I would say that birthed, uh, when you combine that with the, the invention of the microscope, telescope with Galileo’s observations, and by the way, Newton was born within a year of Galileo dying, and so Newton rises up, and, and, and so by the time he’s 26 he discovers laws of optics and gravity, and, and, and so this is the beginning of our rise out of magical thinking. It is the beginning of science as a tool to shape our civilization, because around then, around 1600, Francis Bacon as well would codify what it is to put forth a hypothesis, this scientific method. There were versions of it earlier, but around 1600 is when it, when it became widespread rather than just the writings of one philosopher or another.

38:55 And when it becomes widespread and you realize what you can discover with a hypothesis and a test of that hypothesis, and you discard what doesn’t work, you keep what does. That was the start. And I will assert, as I’ve done in many places in the exploration and discovery chapter, where if you cut into the timeline at any moment, people will be, between 1600 and today, people will be saying, oh my gosh, technology is so transformed our lives. I, I have a book 1898 that was a second edition of that same book, written just a few years earlier.

39:44 It’s a book on the Sun, okay, and I said, well, why is there another edition five years later? And I read the preface, and he says, advances in our understanding of the Sun have come so far in the last five years, we needed a new volume. This is amazing. With new telescopes and new ideas, and understand, it was like, if you only knew, so, so, but what’s going on there is that there’s an exponential growth of discovery, and when you’re on an exponential, everybody thinks all the greatest things happened in their own lifetime or in just their most recent years that they’ve had.

40:23 The thought, everybody will think that no matter where you cut it. I’ve got people saying to me, isn’t it amazing to be alive to see these images from the James Webb Space Telescope? My gosh, how lucky we are. And I’m saying, that’s exactly what people said when Hubble was launched, right? But it’s amazing to be alive.

40:41 Look at this. It’s what people said when the Palomar telescope was finally up and running in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the most powerful telescope in the world, getting data on stars constantly, and gas clouds, and we understand how stars are born, live out their lives, and die from those data. Oh my gosh. In the 1920s, Hubble, the man had the then-largest telescope in the world, one-fourth the power of the Palomar one I just described. He used that telescope to show that the Milky Way was not the only galaxy in the universe and that the universe was expanding.

41:25 Oh my gosh. Oh, incidentally, that decade, we are the centennial anniversary of that decade right now. It was the discovery of quantum physics, which it would take 50 years but would transform and birth, and then transform, information technology for us all. So yeah, yeah, things changed, and they change fast, and they change faster than most people can foresee, because most of the seers into the future are extrapolating, typically linearly extrapolating, but we have five of these today, in a few years we’ll have 10 of them.

42:03 Right, that’s very linear thinking. They’re not saying, oh, there’s some other discovery that’s going to come out of left field or right field somewhere else that’ll completely disrupt this line. This linear thinking, it’s hard, if not impossible, to know what’s coming now. Culturally, when Galileo writes this book, what happens? Because, oh yeah, sorry, that was half of your question.

42:26 Sorry, I got all carried away. So there was an embedded religious philosophy based on, uh, literal reads of the Bible, uh, the, uh, basically the Jewish Bible, so the Old Testament, where Earth is the center of everything. It’s unmoving. Everything else moves around us, and of course, if that’s God’s word, it’s unerring, and there’s no latitude for it to be adjusted, and certainly not for it to be wrong. Galileo shows this, and there’s, he had a couple of interesting retorts attributed to him.

43:07 One of them is, the Bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. So it sounds like a lyric from a rap song. Yeah, uh, and there’s another one, and I will mangle this quote, but I’ll get the right sense of it. Uh, when people were concerned that he’s finding things out that God had not intended, or did, by the, he was a religious man, everyone was religious back then. Um, so he said, he finds it, again I’m going to mangle this quote, he said, I find it hard to believe that God would endow us with the level of intellect we have and there and expect us to forego its use.

43:52 Brilliance to his cosmic discoveries, and he’s showing, show, well, Earth is not the center. All right, and of course he was put on trial, and uh, then put under house arrest, and he was ordered to recant. Um, and the Catholic church, I think, was 1992. They reopened his case and then forgave him, so maybe you can count on the church to do the right thing eventually. So 400 years ago the world was dealing with exponentially changing technology that rattled it to the core, just like we are today.

44:30 And like you said, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, this is constantly happening. Yeah, it is, and I would say if you would imagine something of that magnitude, uh, oh, I would say the idea that our Milky Way is just one of a hundred billion other Milky Ways, that was pretty, I don’t know that that made as big a headline as Galileo’s at the time. But if you stop and pause, that’s a remarkable discovery. The size of the universe grows manifold overnight in the face of those data.

45:04 Then you find out that the universe is expanding, expanding, and what that means is it used to be, yesterday, smaller than it is today. Oh my gosh, that means it had a beginning. Oh my gosh, then we get the Big Bang. Okay, these are, these are um, existential discoveries. No, that’s the wrong term.

45:22 These are discoveries that existential means whether you live or die. What I mean is these are discoveries that deeply influence our understanding of our place in the universe. And so what would be next in this flow? I would say the discovery of alien intelligence, alien life at all, then we’re not alone, as, as biology, and then alien intelligence. That would be an eye-opener right there.

45:52 That would signal a change in the human condition that maybe we cannot foresee or imagine. When do you think that’s probably just waiting right on the wings of the next discovery? And, well, so we’re, get ready for that one. Will James Webb show us that? Oh no, you need radio signals.

46:10 Well, so James Webb, um, a feature of James Webb that was not its original design. In its original design parameters, uh, what I mean by that is James Webb was conceived to observe galaxies being born in the early universe. Well, a telescope that can do that has the power to do other things as well. And so when, when people said, well, what else can it do, and you lay out the rest of its portfolio, oh my gosh, it can observe the atmospheres of planets moving in front of their host stars because then the light comes from the host star, moves through the atmosphere on the edge of the planet, and then makes its way to your telescope.

46:53 And so that original light from the star has been imprinted by gaseous signatures in the atmosphere of the, of the planet, the exoplanet. Right now, we have a catalog of gases that we’re pretty sure you will only find, or primarily find, in the presence of life on the surface of those planets. So these are biomarkers, biosignatures. That’s, and uh, James Webb is participating in that exercise. It’s become quite the cottage industry now.

47:29 Again, these aren’t aliens waving to us or landing, and they’re flying saucers, but um, if life influences its environment in the way we think, the James Webb will participate, uh, on that frontier of discovery. If you had to guess, Neil, how long do you think it is until we identify organic life somewhere in the universe? Is it like a hundred years? Well, so let me tighten that question. That was a clean question, but I’m going to tighten it further.

47:58 So in your, in my lifetime, okay. So we have much less left in our life than the next generation, of course, but I would say, in your my lifetime, we will know whether there was ever life on Mars, or whether there is life on the icy moons of Jupiter. They’re, I see, only on the outer surface. There’s gravitational stressing going on with those moons that pumps heat into them, liquefying the inner regions. The Jupiter moon Europa has an ocean that has as much water as is in all of the Earth’s oceans, and our best models of the formation of life on Earth say that life began in our oceans.

48:41 So we have plans to go ice fishing on Europa. You go to the ice, cut a hole, melt a hole, whatever, by whatever means, and explore. So I think in our lifetime we’ll know whether our solar system has an everyday life, and if it does, that’s just our backyard. Um, that opens the floodgates of, uh, uh, likelihoods that life would be common, practically in any star system that we come upon. Is there an infinite number of star systems?

49:15 And then do you go by that logic? Then that means there is, by definition, life out there. No, no, it’s, it’s better than that. Okay, that there, you’re just relying on the big number hypothesis. Right, right.

49:27 Uh, so big numbers matter, but there are other factors that matter more. For example, you can say, well, what are we made of? The ingredients. Look at the periodic table and put a check in the box that of an element that’s in us, and you start out with hydrogen, but more hydrogen atoms than any other kind of atom. Next, oxygen.

49:49 That’s the next most common atom in our body. Much of those are linked to the hydrogen to make what, the water molecule, because we’re at least half water by weight. Okay, listen, that’s oxygen. Um, very common carbon. Those are the top four chemically active ingredients in our bodies, and it’s the top four chemically active ingredients in the universe.

50:19 So whatever happened on Earth was highly opportunistic, fully exploiting the availability of native ingredients of this universe. So that’s first of all: we’re not made of rare stuff. Second, life on Earth began almost as fast as it possibly could have. Within 100 million years we went from organic molecules, no shortage of the atoms to make those molecules, organic molecules to self-replicating life. So however much we’re challenged in the lab, Earth had no problem accomplishing this.

50:56 Okay, third, the universe is old. However long it takes Earth to evolve into something more interesting than single-celled organisms, the time is available. Not only that, now we get to your big numbers. Uh, how common are planets? If you’re born in 1995, before 1995, in the audience, um, you knew a world, a state of our understanding of the universe where no exoplanets were in the catalog.

51:29 Everyone born 1995 onward, I want to officially knight them as Generation X, no planet. Okay, because they have been born into this world with existing catalogs of planets orbiting stars outside of our own. That catalog is rising through 5,000 planets now, and that’s just in our little corner of the galaxy. So there’s no shortage of planets. There’s no shortage of time.

51:56 There’s no shortage of ingredients. That’s why anyone who studied the problem has very high expectations that we will discover life in the universe. If you want us to be alone or unique, you are following some point of philosophy that does not resonate with anything going on in science right now. They’re religious philosophies that would hold their life on Earth is sacred and unique, for example, and that would put a test to those. So yeah, we’re, we’re good.

52:29 Is there, is there an infinite number of planets or is it finite? So in the observable universe, we count around 100 billion galaxies. So it’s not infinite, but it’s a very large number. There’s many galaxies in the universe, as there are stars in a galaxy, and there may be more planets in a galaxy than stars. We orbit one star, and we’ve got eight planets going around it, right?

52:58 So that’s eight to one. So there might be 10 billion planets in our galaxy, for, let’s say, you know, ten planets per star. We don’t know the full number across the galaxy, but you don’t need to be conservative about it, because of the data that we’ve already obtained and how prevalent they are, and of course not all planets will have the right conditions for life as we know it. But then how about life as we don’t know it, right? So these are all fascinating questions, some of which remain to be answered, but we think we have a good enough handle on them to justify the next steps that we’re taking.

53:39 Yeah, you mentioned that, um, you know, you and I have only a certain amount of time left, and we might find out that maybe there was life once on Mars, or we’ll find out what’s going on with Jupiter. Obviously, I’ve, younger kids are gonna have a little bit more time than us, because they’ll probably live longer than us. My boys are five and six, and it’s probably pretty confident they’ll both live over a hundred. Uh, based on science. Um, are you gonna, do you regret that you won’t be alive to see some incredible discoveries?

54:08 And you write about death in this book. How do you view death, and the concept of eternal life, and these deep philosophical questions, you know, in the perspective of the universe? Yeah, so in other words, uh, what does my knowledge of the universe impart on my thinking regarding life and death? I mean, that’s another way to word what you asked, and I would say there’s all this talk about, will we one day live forever? And that we might one day have that power.

54:43 Okay, and there’s something called the escape velocity of medicine, so for example, um, let’s say you’re born and they figure out how to extend your life by two years. Okay, and then they extend your life by five years. A next generation, and they extend your life, and so, uh, if every year you’re alive they figure out how to extend life another year, then that’s escape velocity. It means you’ll never die. Yeah, because the rate at which the progress is happening is at the same rate that you are getting older.

55:22 Okay, so I don’t have reason to think that they won’t come based on how much we are learning about human physiology. If you want to go there, we need another planet. Sorry, just don’t do it unless we have terraformed Mars. Something Elon totally wants to do. Why do you say that?

55:45 Because we’re having less kids. Neil, is that necessary? Oh, okay. So if every person lives forever, then you have to birth one less kid. Correct.

55:57 That’d be another way to do it, but that’s not very good for the gene pool, right? Okay, right, right. So it doesn’t work. It doesn’t. Okay, it’s not, I mean, it’s not the healthiest way to go about it, but let me speak more personally about this.

56:12 If I could live forever, I wouldn’t, in my current brain wiring. No, I wouldn’t, because knowing I’m going to die brings meaning to my life, and I, I can give examples of this, very clean examples. If you are going to bring flowers to a loved one, you could bring plastic flowers, even silk flowers, which are a little more authentic-looking. Would your loved one how would your loved one feel about that, as the measure of your affection? It’s diminished a bit relative to if you had brought live flowers, freshly cut flowers.

56:59 That’s a curious fact, because the plastic flowers will live forever, but will exist forever. Why isn’t that embraced? The silk flowers are a little more realistic, and they live, why isn’t that embraced? They don’t smell nice. No, well, you can get it.

57:14 You can imagine a perfume. There are ways around that. Right. Yet, what the people really want is a flower knowing it’s going to die, and so you put it in the vase and you watch it. It forces you to notice it every day.

57:31 Yes, not only because of the smell, but because it’s it’s alive. It’s absorbing water. Okay, and typically you buy a flower before it blooms, and then it blooms, so you, you are following the life arc of that flower through its senescence, where the stem can no longer hold up the flower bud, head, and it bends over a week later, 10 days later you pick it up and throw it away. The fact that it was dying, there, was alive, and was going to die, magnified the attention that you give to it.

58:15 Look at dogs. Dogs live, you know, 10 to 14 years, somewhere around there. Uh, you multiply that by seven, you get the life expectancy of humans. So that’s that famous dog years equation. Anyone who’s owned dogs knows that it will jump up and down and lick your face if you just went out to get the mail and came back.

58:41 Every day of a dog’s life is exciting. What’s new today? They’re alive. They’re more alive than we are. Is it because they know they won’t live as long?

58:54 Okay, you know, I’m just, you know, probably not, but let’s, let’s imagine that it’s fun to think that way. Every, we live a week, the dog lives a day. And this, if you look at the math of the life expectancies, and so when I ask myself, how do I want to live my life? I want to live my life like the dog, where I celebrate every day and maximize what I can get out of it, what I can do for others, and this whole talk about search for meaning in life, I take a different attack on that.

59:32 Are you searching for meaning because you expect to find it under a rock, behind a tree? Okay, go on. I’m not going to stop you, but I happen to think that we as humans have the power to manufacture meaning in our lives. For me, I derive meaning from learning more about the world today than I knew yesterday, and ideally it’s not as much as I’ll know tomorrow. Also, I derive meaning by taking a little bit of my life and using it to lessen the suffering of others, so that the world is a better place for me having lived in it.

1:00:15 That, for me, that brings meaning. And I manufacture it. I’m not in search of it. I created that. And so, uh, one of the final quotes of the book is from the great educator Horace Mann.

1:00:30 Uh, I don’t know how well known he is in the UK, but we have schools named after him here in the United States, an educator from two centuries ago, uh, one of his parting addresses to a graduating university class, and I quote: I beseech you. I love that word. We should bring that word back. Yes, okay, yes, very in its moment. I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words: be ashamed to die until you have won some victory or humanity.

1:01:10 I want that on my tombstone. And by the way, arithmetically, if knowing you’re going to die gives meaning to life, then the prospect of living forever means you have a life with no meaning at all. It wouldn’t have to mean that, but arithmetically, that’s the answer you get. Yeah. Because why do today what you can just do tomorrow?

1:01:39 Could be, because you would live forever. But if you got it, but, Neil, if you had another 100 years, you’d probably take it, and you would just keep being exponential, Neil, for the next hundred years. Yeah, but if living a hundred years meant I would be constricting Earth’s resources, preventing others from getting an occasion to be alive. Uh, I don’t know what I do or how I would do it, but you know, this is what the Eskimos did, right? The elders.

1:02:07 There was no resources for the next generation, their elders. They, you know, you put them out on an ice floe and you bid farewell. That’s cold-hearted. I get that, but then we just make another planet. That would be, I don’t have a problem with making another planet, but you can’t just increase everybody’s life expectancy and not have attended resources to go with it and not birth another generation.

1:02:34 I’ll add to that a point that I first saw made by Richard Dawkins which I’ve elaborated further on in this book. If you look at the total number of people who have ever been born, it’s about a hundred billion total. All right. Um, that means nearly 10% of all people who were ever alive are alive right now. That’s just an interesting fact, but so, uh, so that’s about 100 billion.

1:03:05 Now you can ask, how many possible viable humans is the human genome capable of? That’s an interesting question, and it is an astronomically huge number. The most conservative estimate that I put in the book is 10 to the 30th power. Right, this is a trillion trillion billion trillion trillion relative to just simply 100 billion. All right.

1:03:34 What does that mean? That means we get to die. What a privilege that is, because most humans who could ever exist will never even be born, which makes the fact that you and I and all your, your, your listeners and viewers, we won the lottery. We, we are alive here and now. The idea that we have state-sanctioned slaughter to end the lives of other people when this is their only time to exist in this universe.

1:04:21 I, I, I welled up writing about this in the life and death chapter, because once you see how precious it is to be alive at all, if you really, really understood the biology of that and the astronomical calculations related to it, you would never harm another individual in your life. You would celebrate everyone. And it’s a perspective. Let’s say you, this, you, you, if some disease came upon you, or cancer, or some, some deadly it’s a perspective you could take even into that condition.

1:05:08 You know what that perspective is? Is, yeah, I won’t live as long as others, and I’m sad by that, but the greatest triumph here is that I’ve lived at all because it’s better to have lived than to have never even have been conceived. I think, yes, that’s a value judgment I’m placing on it. But yeah, so when you say I’m on my deathbed, well, I regret new discoveries? Yeah.

1:05:39 Yeah, I would, but I’ll understand. I celebrated discoveries in my own life, so I, I, we do. I have something to show for the times that I was alive, and I’m very proud of that. Would Horace Mann say you completed your mission yet? Um, perhaps, perhaps, but I’m not done.

1:06:03 Okay, I, we know that. Um, um, let me ask you a question about science, Neil. Um, you know, it’s interesting how you mentioned the scientific method was kind of born around that time in the 1600s, and or actively invoked. Yeah, it’s a more accurate way to say it. They’re traces of the scientific method.

1:06:22 They go back a little bit in ancient Greece, but also, and especially, in the Golden Age of Islam. So you go back 1300 years. Um, I’ll, Alhazen was a scholar um, of the day, scientists, but back then the word scientist didn’t really exist. There’s more philosopher, lover of knowledge, and he penned some words that, for all the world, read like the scientific method today, trying to warn you to not fool yourself into thinking something is true that isn’t, or that something that isn’t true is so.

1:07:02 Did I say that right? Well, you know what I meant. Yes. So so, um, but yeah, 1600 is when it became widespread, right? And you can look at changes in how we live from then onward that has no counterpart from before, right?

1:07:18 Because of that method. And it was interesting because I, I started talking about this event that happens every year, called, I think it’s the Greater San Diego Science Fair, and it’s big, it’s massive, and when you’re a geek like me, it was an important thing. And the science fair is all about teaching the scientific method to young kids. And I remember, there’s a problem, there’s a hypothesis, you do your experimentation, then you find your conclusion, and you compare it to your hypothesis, and you don’t have to be right.

1:07:44 You just have to learn. And you know, it’s this incredible to me that 400 years later, you know, that hasn’t changed too much. Well, so in fact, let me reword it for you, because what you were recited there, people hardly ever remember it, right? Hypothesis testing, read, retest. That’s, that’s a process.

1:08:06 Let me, let me get to the essence of that process and I will tap two phrases that I uttered just moments ago, but wrap it in a bigger statement. Here it is: the scientific method is simple: do whatever it takes to not fool yourself into thinking that something is true that is not, or that something is not true that is. Okay, again, I hope I said that right. The point is, whatever it takes, it means you know, I should do an experiment. I should write this down.

1:08:44 I should get a recording of it. And by the way, where does the bias come from? It comes from our own brains. We like to celebrate our brains, but, oh my gosh, what, what is a, a book on optical illusions about? Simple line drawings that fool your brain.

1:09:03 Simple, like, oh, the blood isn’t in the page. Out of the page, is the line longer or shorter? I don’t know which is it. This is the great brain that we talk about. What we’ve learned is that the brain is helpful and useful in many ways, but at the end of the day, the susceptibility of your brain to your own bias, be it cultural, religious, geopolitical, um, and completely distorted, the objective reality you are trying to measure.

1:09:36 And so the methods and tools of science were exquisitely tuned to minimize, if not remove entirely, whatever bias you might bring to the experiment. Right, my favorite one to remind me of what my brain can do sometimes is the, uh, is the optic nerve test. You probably remember this one, where you take uh, kind of an X on a piece of paper, and then you can have, like, another, like, a circle on the piece of paper, as you bring it up and focus on one eye.

1:10:04 It’ll actually disappear on one side, and your optic nerve will just paint in whatever the background is, just trying to fool you, and that, it doesn’t put a black spot there. And say, by the way, there’s an optic nerve back there we can’t see. That it just paints it over. Which, whatever the background is, isn’t that a crazy fact? You have to close one eye.

1:10:23 Yeah, and you move the X and the O. Yeah, to a distance where one of them just disappears. It’d be more, it would be better if your brain said, like you said, uh, puts a black dot there and with writing in it. Can’t see the spot right now. Yeah, blind spot.

1:10:39 No, you paint in the surrounding area, and then you think nothing is there, and you will report accurately according to your brain that there was nothing there, but that doesn’t mean that you captured an objective truth. Yeah, that’s, uh, and, and, by, of course, psychologists have known this forever. In any good course on, uh, in law or eyewitness testimony, certainly psychology, you do that experiment in the college classroom, where the professor is just teaching, and then someone comes in and, and robs the professor, you know, of their wallet or something, and you see, is this real?

1:11:21 What just happened? And then, oh, it was completely staged, but you didn’t know it. Now write your account of what happened, and the people on one side got a different account than people on the other and it went through their brain. By the way, we knew this from, from grade school, from playing telephone. Everybody’s played telephone before, and it doesn’t just affect grade school age children.

1:11:44 It affects, are you human? Yeah, you’re going to mess up the information, not only in receiving it, but also in the retelling of it. Science is designed to remove that, or minimize it, or remove it entirely. Yeah. So when you get closer to what is true, so I grew up in the science fairs, and then I learned to program computers, and then I went to MIT and got an engineering degree, and I was all in for the science and the engineering.

1:12:13 And then I fast-forwarded to doing this show over the last 10 years, and I heard of a term called scientism, and it was that you can be so immersed in the scientific method and science that you can somehow not see other things, or not see possibilities: cultural, emotional, energy. And I started thinking, I don’t know, maybe there’s something to that. Now I’m probably not describing it very well, and I’m guessing you’re probably giving this funny look right now, but have you ever considered that possibility?

1:12:42 Or let me just say one more thing. Say there was a scientist from a thousand years ago that had an uneasy feeling that quantum physics was true, but could never do the experiment, and, you know, died, tormented constantly by this, when, in fact, if he had been able to say, you know what, maybe I don’t understand everything, but I can just go with it. I don’t know. I’m doing a terrible job, but do you have any thoughts on scientism, Neil? Yeah, sure.

1:13:08 The literal, that term is invoked by people who feel that science may have overstepped in its influence on culture and on society. That’s the most charitable thing I think I could say about it. Okay. Usually when it’s invoked, it’s as an attack back on scientists, on the accusation that a scientist may be so embedded in paradigms that they’re blind to other forces that might be operating. And then they’d be quick to quote, um, was it Hamlet?

1:13:45 Yeah, Hamlet, where there’s more, there’s more between heaven and earth that are dreamed of in your philosophy. Well, when I first heard that quote invoked against science, I’m saying, what? Why? What? As a scientist, I I’m open to anything and everything.

1:14:08 In fact, what I don’t understand attracts me the most. It’s not just me. Any scientist who is an active scientist will repeat exactly what I just told you. We don’t just sit in our office with our legs up on the table, uh, basking in our conquered knowledge of the universe. We are on the frontier, befuddled, and if you only ever believed newspaper headlines, you would think that we’re somehow uncomfortable with being befuddled.

1:14:39 A newspaper headline would say, “new discovery will send scientists back to the drawing board.” We’re always at the drawing board. If you’re not there, you’re not an active scientist, period. And so that’s my first reaction to the invocation of that term. Um, there might be, there are people who are saying science can’t explain everything, and then the word reductionism comes in, typically because science has, is highly successful at being reductive.

1:15:15 Okay. Is it this tree bark that is a painkiller in your body? Let’s eat the tree bark, and it’s a sacred tree, so there’s a God involved, and there’s a, and the God put a spell in his magic, and there’s this I’ll take the bark and look at the ingredients and find the ingredient that cures your pain. Oh, it’s aspirin. Okay, that’s an example of a scientist being reductive that way.

1:15:41 I don’t have to chew on tree bark, or I don’t have to pray to a god that I don’t know anything about or don’t care about. Right, so that’s reductive, and being reductive is responsible for most of what we call civilization today. I’m just putting it out there. So now, how about the people who say science will never understand love? And I, and I, all I say is, we’re, well, we don’t really understand it today.

1:16:09 Or do you, are you saying science will never understand it, really? And what are you basing that on? Oh, you just don’t want science to understand it. But I can imagine an experiment that determines what love is. You ready?

1:16:25 It’s quite simple. Okay. So we, uh, get some great work of art that people just love. Obviously, different languages have different levels of love. There’s like love of God, love of family, love of objects, right?

1:16:39 So in English we don’t have that. It’s not that nuanced. So I’m just using, do you really, really like something to the point, I love this painting? Okay. To get a painting that many people love, and you observe their brains, and you find out that there’s a part of the brain that is activated when they see this painting, and it’s common for all of these people.

1:17:01 So then you found the love center of the brain. That’s interesting. So now you find something that many people don’t like. Then you go into someone’s brain who hasn’t seen it yet, activate the love center, while you’re showing them this thing that everybody hates. So say, no, you guys are wrong, I love this.

1:17:19 Okay. If, if we get to that point, then we know exactly where the love neurons are, and we can control the love neurons, and it is an emotion stationed in a part of the brain that we know what the electrochemical circuits are, what they do, and how to control them. To me, that’s, that would be science, quote, encroaching on this sacred domain that you don’t want science to touch, called love. And maybe, maybe love is more complex than that. It manifests in more parts of the brain than that.

1:17:58 Could all be true, but I’m not going to stand here and say there are things in the universe that science will never know. I’m not going to say that. By the way, is it in the Book of Job, one of the, the older books in the Bible, where it’s either Job or Abraham, one of those two? Uh, God is talking to him after God’s judgment was, um, questioned. Okay, and then God lists things that at the time no one knew.

1:18:34 There’s a whole list, but you know, why the turn fly south for the winter, and why the, the phases and the tides come in and out, and why? Oh, there’s a whole list of things that go on in nature that God is saying, look, I control this, and you don’t know what the hell is going on here. So when I tell you to do something, you do it. I’m paraphrasing the storyline there, but that’s basically what was happening. And so you look at that list.

1:19:00 In the day, no one knew anything about that. But science has progressed. Yes, we know what causes tides. We know pretty much why birds migrate. We know, and we maybe know two-thirds or three-quarters of what’s on this list, and there’s still some that remain.

1:19:19 This is what science does. It does it exquisitely. So, is scientism the declaration that science will one day learn everything about everything? Yeah, it kind of is. Do we have evidence for thinking that would one day happen?

1:19:32 Yes, we kind of do. That’s the history of human questions that have been posed, and the movement of science that arose to then answer them. So yeah, that’s my long answer to your. Okay, I expected nothing less from you on that one. Um, artificial intelligence.

1:19:52 I want to get your take on this. Um, it’s obviously been something that’s been happening for years or decades, and always something that was going to be in the future. But with this recent emergence of the, the chat GPT, I think the consumer has seen it with their eyes for maybe the first time, and it’s starting to really surprise and shock a lot of people. Now, you know, that’s a large language model, and it’s a narrow AI, but I recently had Dr. Ben Goertzel on the show, of SingularityNET, and he was on about four years ago, and he’s been on Rogan a couple times, and he’s talking always about artificial general intelligence, and I think most people would agree that it’s only a matter of time until we get an artificial general intelligence.

1:20:34 The narrow AIs show us maybe how close we are, and when that happens, we get something that knows how to learn, knows how to alter itself, and you know, is something we’ve really never dealt with as humans. What is Neil deGrasse Tyson’s take on AI potential, AGI, in the future, and will it annihilate us as humans? That’s what I really want to know. That’s the bottom line right there. Bottom line.

1:20:58 So I have a lot of thoughts on this. I generally don’t go public on it, because there are plenty of other opinion setters out there. You don’t need my opinion on this. Uh, and there, people, and every person who presents themselves either is or presents themselves as an expert in AI, they’re terrified by, uh, artificial general intelligence, because that level of intelligence can learn on its own. And so if it learned 10 more today than yesterday, then the next day it learns 10 more on top of a bigger number, and the next day’s time.

1:21:34 So it’s exponential, basically, and it’ll, now acquire all knowledge there ever was. Okay, it rapidly, and then make decisions if we give it power over us. So I joke about it, and I say, well, we should start behaving, because you know, you at least want it. I comment on AI in the book, in body and mind. I say, um, you know, maybe AI, or some super-intelligent alien, will decide to make us their pets.

1:22:02 Okay, and we’re saying, oh my gosh, how terrifying. But then it’s really, how terrifying is that? Most people will step over a homeless person in the street and bring food to their pet when they arrive at home. Okay, we treat our pets, by and large, better than we treat other humans. So maybe if AI makes us their pets, we’ll all be much better off.

1:22:32 But, but the fear factor is, AI says the world is way better off without humans, and it just summarily destroys us. Okay, that’s the fear factor. I have a different view. Okay. And like I said, I don’t lead movements with this.

1:22:50 Um, there’s, and I think you correctly asked the question coming to me, there’s narrow AI, and I don’t see any reason why we would step out of narrow AI Okay, because, what, now, AIs? I have this task. I need a task, and I’m bored with it, or I don’t want to do it, or I’m not good at it. Let the computer do it. My gosh, that’s what’s been happening since the 1960s, ’50s.

1:23:15 The computer’s been doing it. Okay, this is the 1940s when we cracked the Enigma. Okay, uh, where the Enigma cracked the German code. What? So it was something a human being couldn’t do.

1:23:27 We got a machine to do it. By the way, where did that happen? Oh, animals replace human labor in domestication. Okay, we’ve been swapping out our abilities with, by other means, ever since we’ve had agriculture. Okay, so, and by the way, when the computer beat us at chess, a game of our own invention, it beat us at Go.

1:23:50 You beat us at Jeopardy, which is not just logical inference. It’s, oh my gosh, you need some cultural awareness. Did the world come to an end? Did people, you know, create bonfires in the streets? No.

1:24:06 It’s like, okay, that’s cool. All right, I’m trying to make sure I don’t compete against one of those in the next contest. So, um, I, I don’t foresee someone creating AI that not only writes your school essay, but also makes your cup of coffee and drives your car. And I, I don’t see that. I don’t see that as an actual path.

1:24:36 It’s a possible path. I don’t see it as an actual path. And here’s something that was not foreseen in the 1970s, uh, when the Jetsons, 1960s. The Jetsons, by the way, George Jetson, the character, was born in the year 2022. Just if you didn’t know that.

1:24:55 So they’ve got flying cars and everything. Okay, in that world, okay, um, robots were humanoid, right? The maid was a robot that looked like a maid. But wait a minute. If I have a device that automatically puts clothing in the dishwasher, in the washing machine, or automatically loads a dishwasher, does that auto-loader have to look like a humanoid thing?

1:25:24 No. It just has to do what I needed to do. We don’t need a robot like in the movie iRobot. Okay, okay, based on the Isaac Asimov story, uh, these robots were doing things. Including, you can get a robot to drive your car?

1:25:40 No, today the car is the robot. The car makes decisions. It’s not a robot sitting in the car that makes the decisions. It’s a car. Robot, not a humanoid robot that has AGI that I have to do 100 different things.

1:25:56 No, it’s not what I want. I don’t have a need for that. I don’t have a desire for that. So I think this future is safer than we are thinking. But let me add that the AGI robot has all knowledge there ever was that’s on the internet, but I can go rummaging through an archaeological site in Pompeii and discover something that I haven’t written about yet, and I haven’t put on the internet, and I’ll know something it, the AI, does not because I have a curiosity and I have opposable thumbs, and I can travel, whereas your CPU can’t travel, really.

1:26:45 Um, or maybe you stick it in a robot, and the robot will go on an expedition, I suppose. Okay. Has anyone really talked about that? I don’t know. I want to have a vacation and go to the beach and just relax in the sands.

1:26:59 Is AI going to do that? Does it want to do that? Does it derive anything from it? This relates to, if you upload your consciousness, is that you? Well, if the consciousness is sitting in a computer and I go to the Bahamas on a beach, is the computer in the, no, I have a life experience the computer will never have, ever.

1:27:20 So I’m still being me, and the computer is me, ossified in the moment I uploaded my consciousness. By the way, when I go to the beach, I have a life experience that forms a new neurosynaptic possibility for a thought I might not have had before. My uploaded consciousness would be incapable of that thought, because it doesn’t have the new life experiences that contributed to it. So I’m fearless of the future of AI, just the way I was fearless of the Y2K concerns that people had, that the whole world would come to an end by then.

1:27:59 I had already written 50,000 lines of code, and, uh, you know, computers have bugs. They always have bugs, and not everyone was going into the New Millennium at the same time. We have 24 time zones, for example. Okay, so anyhow, yeah, we all survived it just fine. Yeah, I remember the Y2K.

1:28:20 You’re dating me, um, old man. Yeah, yeah. A couple final questions. Um, you know, the big thing that I see in this book, Neil, is addressing the fact that when I go out on social media, I seem to be encountering a world that seems more and more divided every day, as we seem to slice and dice each other up into all these different types of, different types of people. My gender, my sexuality, my color, my this, my nation, my economic status, and that, and it, it just seems like we get further divided.

1:28:53 And, of course, the message I get here on London Real over and over at the end of the shows is “We Are All One.” Something you’re saying in here. How do you, how do you fight what seems to be an unwinnable war on, say, social media, on the division with science, in the universe? And do you think we can win that war? I have a cop-out answer first, and then I’ll give a broader answer.

1:29:18 You know, when the printing press was invented in the 1400s, I forgot the exact year, 14 somethings, um, it would still take a century or more before anyone figured out you could use a printing press to print news on it, and then make a broadsheet and distribute that. That someone had to, like, invent that idea as an application of the printing press, as well as other, can you print something more than the Bible? Sure, all those scrolls, other books that print other books.

1:29:49 All right. So it was a new idea about how to communicate with the masses that required some level of inventive thinking about how to invoke it, and of course the printing press would be used for propaganda. Okay, you can spread false information with it as well. So what do you do about that? Well, there’s not much you can do, because someone could just make a printing press.

1:30:14 All right, so we kind of deal with it all right. Um, to believe that we are in unique times where we have divisive ways, I think, is false. If you go back 80 years, go back right into the Second World War, I did the math on this. You go from 1939 to 1945, 1,000 human beings were killed per hour in the service of that war. One thousand per hour, from 1939 to 1945.

1:30:53 Is there any greater measure of divisiveness than that? So yeah, there’s a dust-up on social media. I’d like taking the long view, so I have context and perspective. Yeah, I wish it weren’t the case, but yeah, and you know, social media feeds anger and hatred, and there’s isolated acts of anger and hatred. Yes, that’s bad, and it should not be, but human beings have been at war with each other ever since we’ve had civilization, and most of that timeline predates the internet.

1:31:36 So I just want to put that out there, just as my first comment, and the internet is new. Getting back to the printing press analog: internet is new in the way social media is new. So maybe we’re just crawling right now. We haven’t really shaken out the adjustment factors to this new means of communication. Maybe in 10 years, a wave of maturity will descend upon us, and the internet will be used as it was intended by those who shaped what it is today, as a means of sharing the greatest of human knowledge and wisdom for the benefit of all, and for entertainment, for sure.

1:32:20 I mean, why not? So, uh, so that’s kind of wishful thinking, that the internet will figure out how to be an internet. And right now we’re not there yet, but what I’ll say much more directly is um, people overvalue their opinions, and when you do that, it leads to fights. I spend the first chapter. It’s called Truth and Beauty and Hope.

1:32:55 The whole first part is on truths. What are truths, right? There’s the kind of truth scientists reach, which are objective truths. These are truths that are established by experiment and observation, okay? Then there’s, like, a political truth, which is what you think is true after it’s been repeated incessantly to you.

1:33:15 That’s the foundations of propaganda. Okay, then there’s a third truth. We call it, let’s call it a personal truth, which is something that is true for you but it’s not necessarily true for other people, and if you require that they share that truth, it will require an act of persuasion or, in the limit, some act of threat or violence. Okay, is Jesus your savior? In a free country, no one is going to take that from you.

1:33:44 Do you require that other people, that, by the way, that’s your personal truth, do you require others feel the same way? Well, we know the consequences of that historically. Is Muhammad your final prophet on Earth? You require, do you require other people feel the same way? So to the extent that we recognize when our personal truth is only that, and just that, in a free country I have my personal truth.

1:34:14 You can’t take it from me, and the law protects my personal truth, as it should. Objective truth, if you’re going to make laws and legislation, I kind of think it should be based on objective truths, because those would apply to everyone, whether or not you believe in those laws, in those truths. That’s what an objective truth is: it’s true whether or not you believe in it. That’s kind of a good thing to base laws on, that have to apply to everybody. I’m thinking, okay, so what do we do about it?

1:34:49 I think not enough people learn in school, or are taught in school, what science is, and how and why it works. So the science deniers out there, like, why are you denying science? Oh, because science is saying something you don’t like, you don’t want to be true. You don’t have that option. No, that’s not how it works.

1:35:11 You can’t protest the laws of gravity next week because you gain three pounds this week. No, no, it’s not subject to your opinion, and I don’t think enough of us know this. So that when you have fights in Parliament or in Congress, let those fights be about true opinions. Oh, should we have a carbon tax, or should we levy tariffs? Should we?

1:35:40 These are genuine political opinions. But if you go into the halls of government and they’re fighting over whether humans are warming the Earth, fighting over whether or not that’s true, you are wasting time, precious time, because that is not the behavior of people who should be shepherds of our civilization. Neil, what are you doing next? Last time you were in London you were promoting Cosmos. It was on Discovery, where nine years later now you’re writing books.

1:36:18 It was actually aired on Fox and National Geographic internationally, on National Geographic Channel. Yeah, and now you’re writing books about things not just science, astrophysics, which is really refreshing. What are you doing nine years from now? What else is on, what are on the cards for you next? Okay.

1:36:33 So this book, by the way, uh, though it tackles civilization, my father was a sociologist. By the way, so I, my, my earliest sort of baptism into cultural baptism was exposure to what, how people treat one another, and how they, um, and the bitterness that some exhibit towards others, and how do you respond, how should you respond? My father was never bitter. You know, he grew up in, you know, the worst of times. Well, slavery was worse for sure, but relative to my life, his, there’s no comparison to the struggles he went through growing up in America at a time he served in the armed forces.

1:37:19 The Army was segregated. That’s kind of weird. You know, you’re gonna go out and fight Germans. Oh, but I’m, I’m not fighting alongside you because your skin color is different? That’s really like what, like, really?

1:37:33 What? Okay. Oh, by the way, if we’re gonna divide, I don’t mind dividing people by the identity, however you’re, I don’t mind that, provided the act of doing so does not leave you ending up ranking people because of it. If by dividing people you want to then rank them by how you’ve divided them, this never ends well, ever. But if you like pepperoni on your pizza and someone else likes olives, okay, that’s the kind of, okay, you, you like girls, I like boys, you like this, uh, you like some androgyny, I like this.

1:38:15 If it’s just who all we all are, then we could all live together and not pass judgment. That’s the goal here. Don’t say let’s be blind to all differences. No, because there are differences, and sometimes you want to celebrate those differences. You want to rank them.

1:38:35 Uh, yeah, those who do the ranking generally then pass a law restricting the freedoms of those who they’ve ranked below themselves, and that has been, is, and would continue to be devastating to the stability of a culture. So in nine years, I have a couple more projects that I feel very strongly about, um, but they’re still in the oven, so they’re half-baked, and I don’t like talking about half-baked things, because why are you doing that? What books or films or series or more social stuff?

1:39:13 I have a couple more books that I have in mind, and by the way, there’s always this other, I have my podcast, StarTalk. Yeah, I know. Uh, that was, I’m very proud of that podcast. It brings science to the public with humor and pop culture and things that make you smile and laugh, and you’ll learn something for a change if you’re spending time, uh, otherwise doing nothing. And so, uh, that’s in its 14th year right now, and, uh, yeah, I have Mike, co-host, a stand-up comedian, and um, our guests can be celebrity guests, where we learn something about their lives and then talk about the science that has touched their lives.

1:39:59 So that’s always fun. That’s where you learn about the geek underbelly of some, like, for example, we recently lost David Crosby, uh, the musician. I had him on StarTalk. Did you know, I don’t know if you knew this, he was a science fiction buff and read all the science fiction he could get a hold of before he ever penned his first musical note, and I said, yes, yes, there’s some hidden geek underbelly that percolates among us. And so those are keeping you alive.

1:40:31 Uh, and you like bringing comedy and entertainment into science. You’ve been doing that ever since, I think the local news had you on, and you realized that, you know, you’ve got to capture people’s attention to bring the message to them, and I think you love doing that as well. Yeah, I mean, it’s, as Carl Sagan said, when you love, you want to tell the world. So it’s really just a spillage of that emotion. The book is Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization.

1:41:00 It’s a beautiful book, beautiful cover. Uh, what’s the best way for people to get this, and then, uh, what’s the best way for them to follow you? Yeah, so it’s been simultaneously printed in the UK, with, you know, you guys have a slightly different cover than we do, but it’s all, by the way, forgive the fact that we have American spellings in there. I think we will, but yeah, you, you’ll get through it. I think you’ll, you’ll survive it.

1:41:25 Um, and it’s, it’s probably now in its 20th translation around the world, so that’s a good sign. And, um, so it’s available wherever books are sold. I mean, I hate to sound so cliched about that, but, and certainly online, although not all countries have access to the same online merchant, uh, merchanting that goes on. Um, and, uh, yeah, I’m on, uh, four of all four of the four major social media platforms. So Facebook, Neil deGrasse Tyson, um, TikTok, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Instagram, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Twitter, where they’re counting how many letters you use.

1:42:04 We tighten that up to just simply Neil Tyson. Okay. And, uh, my webpage, neildegrassetyson.com. If you want accurate biography, that’s where you’ll get it. Yeah.

1:42:16 Well, fantastic. I recommend everyone get the book, and, uh, yeah, Neil, I just want to say thank you for coming on the show nine years ago. It was a big deal. It really helped propel London Real to where we are today. Um, and for me at the time, it was extremely memorable, enough to make it in my TED Talk.

1:42:34 So, thank you. I remember you being, I’m honored. Anything that works in its way to a 20-minute TED Talk, uh, that’s very high honor. So thank you. It was big.

1:42:43 I still remember it. You were making fun of all the cameras. You were talking to the different cameras, but you know, you gave me a hundred percent, and you were on a media day. I was probably one of 12 interviews, and, uh, we had a fantastic, I can’t get fatiguing, but I, each one is its own thing, so I never forget that. Yeah, I know, and you always bring it.

1:43:01 So thank you. Appreciate the service, Neil. It’s a fantastic book. Uh, keep doing what you do. It’s so important, and, um, yeah, thank you very much, and you keep up the conversation as well, because without that, uh, what are our alternatives, when you really think about it, at the end of the day?

1:43:17 So it’s so important to having nuanced, long-form conversation, and for people to walk a few miles in another man’s or woman’s shoes. I think is really important. So yeah, we’ll keep it up for sure. All right, all right. Thank you so much, sir.

1:43:29 I appreciate you. Thank you all. We’ll see you next time on London Real. Take care. Bye.