Transcript: The Brutal Truth About Astrology! – Neil deGrasse Tyson on DOAC Podcast

And so it’s not that we are alive in the universe. Yes, that’s true. But the universe is alive within us.

So we’re special because we’re the same as the universe. Often when people think they’re special, they want to be different from it. No, we’re saying because we have human DNA on an Earth where we have DNA in common with all other animals, all other life forms on Earth.

Do you realize we and mushrooms have more in common with each other than either we or mushrooms have with green plants? The common ancestor between fungus and animals split later in the tree of life, then its common ancestor split with green plants.

You have 20% identical genes to a banana. Excuse me, we all do. Not just you. Not just you.

So when you consider all of this, it’s not just that we’re alive in the universe. The universe is alive within us. And that discovery borders on the spiritual. And it’s a scientific result.

So when I look up at night, I never feel small. I feel large. I feel as large as the universe itself, because that’s where we came from. We’re a participant in a great unfolding story of cosmic evolution.

The Paradox of Oneness

STEVEN BARTLETT: The minute you said that, I thought of all these Eastern traditions and religions that say we are one. And from a scientific perspective, as you say, we very much are one.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah. What’s interesting is one of my deep concerns about the world is many philosophies or religions that say we are one, they find some other philosophy that differs, and then they go to war.

I don’t mean to laugh at that, but we’re not good at feeling oneness with everyone. It’s easy to feel oneness with our tribe. Our tribe could be skin color, religion, who you sleep with, who you don’t sleep with, what food you eat, what rituals you perform.

And so those people choose signs based on so many factors that it’s actually, to me, just as a scientist, it’s disturbing how easily and quickly we will divide each other and make that the reason for how you interact, rather than see what we have in common and make that the reason for why we would come together.

Division as the Root Cause

STEVEN BARTLETT: This has been really front of mind for me for the last 24 hours. There’s been a lot of things that happened in the news that have thrown the conversation around division to the very front of my mind.

And in the UK we’ve got all these people that are marching next week, I believe, through London because of various political things. And I was saying to my friends last night, I said, I think actually that the root cause isn’t this or that. It’s the division itself.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You can overanalyze. I mean, if you look deeper than whatever people are saying is the reason they are marching or arguing, if you just park the curtains and unpack it all, at the bottom of that is there’s a tribe here and a tribe here, and they think this way and they think that way, and never the twain meet unless we rethink how we interact with one another.

Think about it, you know, with the race friction that existed around the world, but especially in colonial Europe and the slave trade and all of this, and okay, that’s not good, it’s bad. And all right. But then you look at World War I and World War II, that’s white people fighting white people, slaughtering them in great numbers.

So you can divide by skin color. But apparently people find plenty of reasons to divide and conquer, to divide and kill, to divide and oppress. And skin color is one in a long list of all the reasons people have given to religious wars, to worshiping the different God or worshiping the God differently.

These are human beings. And I wrote a whole book, I think one of those books in your stash there, that one, “Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization.” That one is what conflict in the world looks like when you are scientifically literate and you have a dose of cosmic perspective on top of it.

The Cosmic Perspective

STEVEN BARTLETT: Give me the cosmic perspective, please.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You’re fighting over that line in the sand. When I’m out here at the moon, looking at Earth, this fragile ecosystem, do you realize Earth’s atmosphere is to Earth what the skin of an apple is to an apple in terms of thickness?

So I see people trashing the planet, fighting one another again, just based on who’s on what side of the line in the sand or who they worship, who they don’t worship or what their skin color is or where they were born, what language they speak, what accent they have.

And I step back, and from orbit, it’s ocean, land, clouds. From the moon, there’s Earth suspended there in space. I almost don’t want to zoom in on it, because people value what they think is true more than what is true.

There are objective truths out there, but it’s almost as though people fight and argue more vehemently the less evidence there is to support what it is they think is true.

There’s an old saying: if an argument lasts more than five minutes, then both sides are wrong. It’s true probably 80, 90% of the time, but it’s something, definitely something to think about.

Spiritual and Religious Evolution

STEVEN BARTLETT: How have your spiritual and religious beliefs evolved throughout the course of your career based on all that you’ve come to know about the objective nature of the universe? Has there been an evolution?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It depends on what you mean by evolution. I was raised Catholic.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

The Evolution of Belief and Understanding

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But we were raised basically in a secular household, even though we would go to church every weekend. What I mean by that is, we come home. At no time do either of my parents say, “don’t do that. Jesus is watching.” “You keep that up, you’ll go to hell.” “Do this because it’ll please God.” Never was there such a conversation as that in the household.

So the household was driven by objective truths or life experience, as would be brought from elders to a next generation, something that was more common in that generation than in the current generation, because now elders don’t know anything about anything. You know, your kid comes up to you and say, “mommy, Daddy, I want to be a YouTube influencer.” And you’re saying, “what, go back to school?” No. And then they become a YouTube influencer and they out earn you.

So the divide is greater than ever before between one generation and the next, for sure. But by the time I turn eight, I found the religious teachings less and less convincing. And so by the time I was nine, when I discovered the universe, or really the universe discovered me, a first visit to my local planetarium. So, yeah, I wouldn’t call it an evolution, but I will say this.

You didn’t ask this, but it relates. Before I was more recognized, you’d be on an airplane. “What do you do? What do you do?” Okay. They find out I do astrophysics. Then out come the questions, okay, “oh, tell me about black holes, relativity, the big bang, aliens.” Okay. And would always land on God.

And I used to give pretty straight unforgiving answers to that question, to that inquiry. But then I thought, that’s not fair. There are people whose lives pivot around their religious beliefs and their spirituality. And just because I’ve been discounting it since I was 8, I shouldn’t use that as a force against them. I should at least understand where they’re coming from.

Studying Religion as an Academic

So I systematically acquired religious books of all kinds. So I have the Torah, I have multiple copies of the Quran, Joseph Smith’s account that led to the Mormons. I have multiple bits of literature from Jehovah’s Witnesses because they’ll come to your door and they want to hand you. So I acquired all these books, and I mostly read them. I’ve skimmed all of them and read some of them with a little more intensity than others.

On doing so, that enabled me, empowered me to have more meaningful conversations with people who were religious. Much more meaningful and more informed. That’s the key. I don’t want to speak about a religion unless I know as much as I can about it as an academic. That should be what would be true of any subject. You’re an academic. You care what’s true, not what you think is true, what is true or what people think.

And there’s no doubt that religion has been one of the greatest forces operating on civilization ever since civilization. When you look at as a source of people’s behavior, what they eat, like I said, who they sleep with, where they sleep, where they worship, who they worship all around the world, from animistic native peoples where there’s a spirit energy imbued in the mountain, in the brook, in the wind, to the monotheistic religions, to the polytheistic religions, we don’t call them that to put distance between us.

But the Greek gods, it was their religion. We call it mythology. It was their religion. The Greek gods, the Roman gods. So I’m conversational in all of this. So that when someone says, “how do I feel? What do I think?” I can do that without just being obnoxious and we have a meaningful conversation.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I haven’t done that.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You haven’t?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, I haven’t.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I haven’t.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But it’s such a good idea to do that, especially as someone in my position that does a lot of talking with people and asking questions. But the first thing that sprung to mind was there was actually two questions that sprung to mind was how did that change you reading all those books, outside of you being able to relate with those well, being able to talk to them in a different way, and the second question, because I’ve watched Cosmos, I’ve watched it several times. It’s one of my, me and my partner’s favorite things to watch is you going from the very beginnings of time through the universe and to where we are.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You got to love that calendar too, the cosmic calendar.

STEVEN BARTLETT: My favorite thing I try and persuade everybody to watch that. My question was about, because I watched that and I watched how the universe has evolved over time, or at least our understanding of it and how it came to be is, did humans evolve at some point to believe? Are we meant to believe?

The Origins of Human Belief

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, so the best way to ask that is let’s go back to the earliest humans we have fossil records of. And we can go back to Neanderthal, for example. Neanderthal is a branch hominids that went extinct. Basically there’s some cross breeding and there’s Neanderthal DNA in many humans today. But as a branch of the hominids, they went extinct.

So Neanderthal. Then there’s Cro-Magnon. We are Homo sapiens coming after Cro-Magnon. And so when you look at burial grounds, the Neanderthal bury their dead with things, with parts of their life of the person who died. Now why would you do that unless you had some belief that there was something more to come for that person?

I mean, that probably the people who took it to the limit were the Egyptians, for the Egyptian royalty. I mean, they bury you with all kinds of stuff. And in fact, in Greece I read this. It’s not that I researched it, and I’m not a scholar in this, but that when they buried you, they put a coin in your mouth or in your hand somewhere on your body, so that when you got into Hades, you can tip the ferry boat driver to cross the River Styx to get into Hades.

You might even say that’s the beginning of what it was to be human when people started thinking that way about dying. Might even invert the question and say it’s not when did we start? It’s we existed in all the ways we know our, know what ourselves to be when that ritual came upon our ancestors.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the survival benefit in believing.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I don’t know.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Really?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, I don’t know. We’re pretty sure there’s a survival benefit of groupthink and religion is groupthink. If there ever was, it was. We will all believe this in this way and we will behave in that way on those occasions. And you will not deviate from it.

And part of that package of beliefs includes statements about the afterlife and how you should behave in this life. Otherwise you don’t go to heaven, you go to hell. I don’t think Judaism has a hell, but you’re not as rewarded as you’d otherwise be.

Now, that forms a corpus of beliefs that can be highly binding of a people’s and especially if some other peoples come up and they do other things and you don’t understand it, you don’t know what it is, and they’re a threat, and so you keep them out. You do whatever you can to preserve your traditions relative to theirs. Ultimately, the worst, that in its worst manifestation is all out war. We just kill people who don’t believe the way you do.

So maybe religion is kind of what defined humans in the fossil record. I mean, that’s an interesting inversion of that question. Not when did humans begin being religious. You define who we are as humans as when religion showed up in the burial grounds of cavemen.

The Power of Ritual and Community

STEVEN BARTLETT: You just talked about us being bound there by certain shared beliefs and ideas.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I think, in case.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I think ritual is one of the strongest binding forces of society that we have.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I think that people are maybe unbinding. If you look at the narrative in society, it’s about be your own boss, stand on your own two feet. More people are lonely, living alone, having less kids, working freelance and remotely. So it feels like in a weird way, we’re becoming more independent and there’s somewhat of a cost to that.

And actually, my friends that are struggling the most in their lives are those that have the least dependence on a village. So I always wonder if people. We need to ladder up to the universe, that is me, my family, maybe my village, maybe my country, the planet, the universe, the metaverse. Yeah.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And God, the multiverse. Yeah. So let me just react to that. There have been studies about the psychological effects of this kind of life. Basically the social media too early in one’s life force that operates. But I, so I don’t know. I don’t want to be the person who says, “in my day, we did it right. And you youngins don’t know what you’re doing, and you’re all going to.”

I mean, I’ve seen the films of people, of officials smashing pinball machines with sledgehammers, saying it will be the death of the next generation. Because they’re not studying. It’s gambling. You’ve seen people burning rock and roll records. You know, we’ve seen this. And I don’t want to be that guy.

I’d rather be the person that says they’re going to create a whole other reality. That was not my reality growing up. And I don’t know that I can or should value judge that. When they come up in the ranks, they’ll be mature adults, they’ll figure out what the rhythms are of that world.

And I will say, however, that if you go far enough back, no one ever traveled anywhere. You’d spend your whole life not going more than 30 miles from your hometown to a couple hundred years back. So now people do actually communicate with countless thousands of people around the world. So that’s it’s different.

Again, I’m not value judging it, but it’s different and you’re exposed to different ideas. Maybe it tribalizes you more or maybe it softens you. It has the power to do both.

Objective Truth vs. Opinion

What concerns me is because when I post to social media, I’ve learned the art of not expressing an opinion because I don’t care what your opinion is. I don’t care that you have my opinion. What I care about as an educator and especially as a scientist is that your opinion is based on objective reality, objective truths.

If you have an opinion where the foundation of it is, what do you what then? You’re just floating. There’s no and then if you rise to power of laws and legislation and then you shape a society based on what you think is true or want to be true rather than what is objectively true, that’s a recipe for the unraveling of civilization as we know it.

So this loneliness bit, I don’t know how to comment on that. I don’t have the expertise, but I do know that I don’t want to be the person on the rocking chair, “get off my lawn,” you know, and.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess I’ve been trying to figure out if I need to try and make sure my life ladders upwards.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, let me get back to that. So it may be that the most important role of church wasn’t to give a specific recipe for how you pray or again, who you pray to or when you. Maybe that wasn’t its greatest value. Maybe its greatest value was the community that it created. Everyone comes together and they’re all in one room at the same time.

That’s not happening today. Like you said, there’s a. People are less religious today than ever before. Many people who were once religious would today, statistically would today say they’re spiritual, which means they’re separated from the rules and regulations that typically dictate how you behave within a religion.

But the fact is you’re talking about going upwards. So you have your city, your community, your neighbors and your church, your synagogue, your mosque, your temple, whatever is the place where you gather with some frequency that surely has value because we need each other.

Human Interdependence

I’m jealous when I, you know, you drive down the country road and there’s a deer just walking around, and I’m thinking, you know, society collapsed. That deer is just fine. The deer was born in the woods, is finding food, is grown up, whereas I need other people to survive in this world.

I don’t know how to hunt. I don’t know how to skin game. I don’t know. You know, I’d like knowing that there’s a quart of milk waiting for me on the grocery store and, you know, ready to eat cereals. That’s. We have an interdependence as never before. And how do we maintain that without scattering to the winds?

STEVEN BARTLETT: You said you lost both your parents in the last five years.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: As someone that knows so much about the universe and objective truth and reality, how do you contend with grief in that scenario? But also, how does that, does that change you in any way?

The Impact of Loss and Legacy

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It did a little bit. Not as much as I thought it might have. My father was 89 when he died. That was five years ago. My mother was two days shy of her 95th birthday. So I’m putting myself right between them in my life expectancy. I think I’ll get to 92. It’s the average of those two.

So when you die at that age, it’s sad, but it’s not tragic. So that’s an important distinction. For me, tragic life is a life that could have been lived but through act of war or negligence or negligence of the person or of others, the life is cut short. Then that’s tragic. It’s a life not fully lived, but if you lived a full life, they were married 50 something years. It’s sad, but it’s not tragic. In fact, it’s not even sad. It’s something to celebrate.

And so I miss them. I miss them more than I thought I would because they carried quite a bit of wisdom with them. My father was active in the civil rights movement. My mother was a gerontologist. So they both cared very deeply about the plight of others. And I’m their son, the astrophysicist. But so I go off with my head in the sky. But I was anchored into the human condition and anchored to think about it, to care about it.

And when I encountered things in modern life, I wonder what my mother would say about that. I wonder what insights my father. And they’re not there. I don’t have them for that. So the way it’s changed me is it has put a greater expectation of me on myself to make sure I have wisdom that I can share with my kids, my two kids, the kind of wisdom that I glean from my parents.

So that, again, this is not wisdom of what car to buy or what job to have, because they have other values, they have other expectations of society, but in terms of human to human interaction, in terms of love, in terms of challenges in life and overcoming them. Some of those are timeless, some of those are how to navigate difficult people, how to appreciate nature, so you don’t take it for granted.

The Artist’s Role in Seeing Beauty

One of the things I liked about Joyce Kilmer’s poem “On a Tree” is about a tree. And we’ve all seen trees. So why does this matter? Because it takes an artist, a poet, a writer, a sculptor, a painter. For me, the artist’s job is to encourage us, stimulate us to pay attention to things we might otherwise take for granted. Because so much of life is what you might just walk by and not even give it any thought. And so I don’t walk by trees without thinking something about that poem.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the poem?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: “I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed against the earth’s sweet flowering breast. A tree that looks at God all day and lifts her leafy arms to pray. A tree that may in summer wear a nest of robins in her hair upon whose bosom snow has lain who ultimately lives with rain. Poems are made by fools like me but only God can make a tree.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: “But only God can make a tree.” I spend so long these days thinking and talking to people about what all of this means, and I’ve got more and more. I saw you talking about the simulation theory once or twice and I started to fall into that.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That whole of thinking, oh, yes, you’ve got to step outside every now and then and smell the roses.

The Simulation Theory Debate

STEVEN BARTLETT: But you said you wouldn’t be surprised if people found out the universe is simulated by some sort of advanced life form.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah. Given what we can now compute. Throw in quantum computing on top of that. We don’t have this power yet, but to make a world in our computer where the characters in that world believe they have free will, and then they conduct themselves, and then they invent computers, and then they make a world inside of their computer and where their characters think they have free will and then they. So then it’s this simulated universe is all the way down and close your eyes and throw a dart. Which of these are you going to get? The first universe that invented the simulated universe or the zillion ones that followed? The dart’s likely to hit one of the others.

But my escape hatch from that is since we do not yet know or have the power to make a perfectly simulated world, it means we are either the first universe that’s real, that hasn’t created one yet, or we’re the last universe that hasn’t evolved yet to have created one of its own. Because all the middles have the power to create one. So that takes it, you know, a zillion to one against us to maybe 50-50?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, interesting.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah. So I’m a little more comfortable that way.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Comfortable?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, I sleep a little better at night.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But I guess it wouldn’t matter anyway.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Actually it wouldn’t matter if we’re completely simulated. What do you care? You living your life. I know we don’t want to believe that there are puppet strings on us. Part of me thinks that though, you know, just when Earth is kind of, everything on Earth is kind of stable. Oh, Covid shows up. Oh, so this is the programmer saying, you know, the Earth is too boring now. We’ve got to spice it up a bit. They throw in a pandemic, okay? A once in a century pandemic.

Now, now we’re entertaining for them. What do we do? Who gets vaccinated, who doesn’t, who’s going to fight, who dies, who lives? Okay, so then we kind of get through that, we get the vaccine, okay, just calming down off of that. And they said, oh, let’s make a billionaire real estate developer from New York City the most powerful person in the world. Let’s stir the pot again. And so now the whole other set of pot stirring that’s going on.

So that’s kind of consistent with a snot nosed alien kid in the parents basement programming our existence. That’s what I would do. I would throw in interest. There’s a game, SimCity, I played that. That’s how old I am. SimCity. So you are mayor of this city and people can vote you out of office. So you have to do things that make them happy. And there’s an opinion poll that’s there. And if you spend too much money here, you’re not spending money on the schools, that’s bad. But then as crime goes up and you’re realizing, oh, my gosh, in even this simple simulation, so many interdependent phenomenon are taking place.

Then things that happen. Then Godzilla steps through and plows through the city. Okay, now Godzilla’s not real, but it kind of is because that would be a disaster. That. Is it a flood? Is it fires? It’s a thing that nobody saw coming. Okay, we are recording this interview on September 11th. I live four blocks from ground zero. That’s Godzilla walking through the city. Well, how do you respond to that? You didn’t know that was going to happen the day before.

So realizing that in this game, it’s only interesting to play when disastrous things happen. Not too many in a row, because you have to be able to recover. So when I look at our world, I’m thinking the best argument I have for being in a simulation is how often some big disaster takes place. When it was the First World War, and then after that, the peace. Oh, pandemic. Okay, the 1918 flu pandemic. Now we got out of that. Oh, no. Second World War. Okay, we get out of that. The Cold War, nuclear holocaust. Okay, so that’s my. That’s me looking over the shoulder of the programmer.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, God. I think I prefer the world where I feel like I have free will and there’s not.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Does it make a difference if you believe you have free will even if you don’t?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No. Because I’ll never know.

Free Will and Living with Purpose

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And you know the fun answer to that? Ask me. Say, do you have free will? Ask me that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do we have free will? Do you have free will?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: What choice do I have? No, if you don’t have free will, then you don’t even have an option to say you don’t. So you just live life, just live your life so that the world is better off for you having lived in it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what does that mean for you?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It means people are better off. Institutions are better off, People are happier, healthier, wealthier, safer, better fed. That rationality matters in politics and lawmaking, and that helps, will help to ensure stability of anything you build going forward. But, yeah, that’s all. I mean, it’s not complicated.

And you were talking about meaning before. I stopped looking for meaning decades ago. Because I realize any of us has the power to make meaning in life. If you’re going to look for meaning, are you looking under a rock behind a tree? What? It’s as though meaning is sitting there waiting for you to find it. Oh, I found meaning. There it is now, my life is complete, that feels so powerless on your own destiny.

Whereas I make meaning. I want to learn something today that I didn’t know yesterday. I want to lessen the suffering of someone today compared with however that person was living yesterday. I want to use what I learn to well up within me and manifest as wisdom. Because information is not really useful until it becomes knowledge. And then knowledge is good. You can show off if you have a lot of knowledge. That’s what these game shows do. But in the end, the best use of knowledge is when it becomes wisdom.

The Value of Aging and Wisdom

And wisdom. People say, I don’t like getting older. I want to be young. I don’t want to be young again. When I was 30, I was an idiot. Even when I was 30, I thought I was brilliant, right? So don’t get older unless you have wisdom to show for it. It’s when you don’t have something to show for your age, you want to be younger. You’re just getting old with nothing to show for it.

But I continue to learn things every day passively and actively. Passively is you just notice, you know, open your eyes sometimes and see what’s happening, where things are headed, what they’re doing. You learn. Not all things you learn are good. And if they’re bad or need adjustment or need help, do something about it if you can. So that’s how I derive meaning. Hence my tombstone, “be ashamed to die unless you scored some victory for humanity.” There’s the meaning for you.

Escape Velocity and Living Forever

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s a whole class of billionaires that are trying to live forever now. And I think we are on the verge of being able to extend life potentially indefinitely.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, we’re looking for the date. It’s called escape velocity. You know about that phrase? It exists in astrophysics, of course, but escape velocity for Earth, for example, is 7 miles per second. So escape velocity in astrophysics is the speed that you launch something so that it never comes back, no matter how hard the gravity tries. Okay, so every object has an escape velocity.

Escape velocity in aging is the idea is there is a generation yet to be born, but in the very near future who will not only live longer than the previous generation. So here’s a cleaner way to say this. Every year you can expect to live one month longer because knowledge about human physiology has gotten better. Okay, just think about it that way. And so we know what to eat, what not to eat, how to exercise, how to not over exercise, how to maintain your health and physiology. All right?

There will come a day where every year that you’re alive, medicine has figured out a way for you to live an extra year. That’s the escape velocity. So every year you live another year. And after that it could be every year you live two years. So that’s the escape velocity. So it’s not just everybody lives forever today it sort of works its way into the population and yeah, I don’t want to live forever.

I don’t take me off this earth, provided, I mean, I still have more to give, more books to write that in my judgment, would make the world better than it currently is. So I don’t want to die before I get as much of that done as I can.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But are you scared of death?

The Reality of Immortality and Legacy

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: No. Although that’s easy to say because I’m not at death’s door. And I had someone rationalize with me, which is they made a potent argument. I can say now with another 20 years life expectancy, 15, 20 years, that I don’t fear death. But if I’m on my deathbed and someone says if I can wave my hand and you can live another year, would you? The answer is probably going to be yes. And at the end of that year. So I don’t know if my sentiments about life and death will change on my deathbed.

I know my mother, there’s a point where she couldn’t swallow and she didn’t want a feed tube and she said, my time has come. Put me in palliative care and then hospice and she was dead 10 days later. So she was in charge of her. They could have fed her with a tube and she would have been completely healthy for another five years perhaps, but no, she raised two kids, three kids, 50 year marriage, happy life, stable life. And yeah, I’m good with that.

So the billionaires, that’s ego for sure. If you live forever, there are other people who you’re taking resources from, who would come behind you. That’s one. But two, are you still contributing to the world? Should you give another person a chance who’s in school now, who might be the next genius that’ll figure out the energy problem, the poverty problem, the pollution problem. Are you figuring that out? No, you’re in the last. You’re 90 years old and you’re just living on your yacht.

So there’s the problem that the last years of your life are not the most creative, the most ambitious, the most irreverent. It’s irreverent that where new ideas come. Half or more of those people are 30 and under. They got ideas, fresh ideas. Everyone else is entrenched. So if people start living forever, they’re living forever in the part of their life that is least useful to the progress and advance of culture and civilization. And so all of civilization will stagnate.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did you think in your lifetime, you said you’ve got a 20 year life expectancy?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, 15 to 20.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 15 to 20 year life expectancy based.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: On my age now and the age of my parents died.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, but I mean, you’ve done a lot of neurological work and laid down a lot of good foundations with all these books you’ve written. So maybe it’ll be the upper end of that.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It’s food for AI. It was food for ChatGPT.

The Promise and Limits of Artificial Intelligence

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you make of AI? What’s your. When you.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I love it. Yeah, I love it. But I’m. By the way, it’s been here for a while. It really spooked people when it started writing your term paper and composing your painting and your set design. The whole other category of people got spooked by that. Meanwhile, AI has been harnessed and being fully used in my field and in most of the physical sciences, it’s doing work. If you can do the work, and I can go to the Bahamas, let it do the work.

We have telescopes coming online that could not exist without the intervention of AI to access the data, reduce the data, analyze the data, make a decision about whether it should go back to the thing that it just observed. Because that was weird compared to the last time it was observed. This is the Vera Rubin telescope that I’m literally describing now. And so we’re living with it.

What it means is it’ll have to up the game of people who say they are creative. And what I mean by that is I can say, ChatGPT, take this picture of us and say, ChatGPT, paint this scene in the style of Van Gogh. It’ll come back, the colors will be just right. It’ll have the swirly lines. It’ll be perfect. If Van Gogh was standing, that’s what Van Gogh would have painted.

If I say, ChatGPT, paint us in the style of no artist who has ever lived. I don’t know what it’s going to give us, but it’ll probably suck. Okay? And so true creativity is not aping what has happened before and making adjustments. True creativity, yes. You always build on others. I’m not in denial of that. But true creativity takes leaps that most people don’t even know can be taken. And so the artist. So that gap, I think, is what AI in the arts world is going to force creative people to reach for. Otherwise, you’re replaced by. You’re replaced by a simple request in the input line of a large language model or of an art.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was just wondering then, if I watch Cosmos in 30, 40 years time, let’s say 100 years time, I was wondering if this is the moment where humans and computers in the story of humanity become one and intertwine. If you think about things like Neuralink, which Elon’s working on to make. When he first made that company, all of the narrative that he put out there was about us being able to interface with AI. So we’d need a brain chip, computer interface. More recently, it’s been about people that are paraplegic and disabled and helping blind people see. But I think that’s a socially acceptable way to advance the technology. But in his early work, he said superintelligence is going to arrive and we’re going to need a way to basically keep up where we have better sort of latency with the technology. And I’m wondering if that’s what we’re seeing now.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, super intelligence. If that happens, then it becomes our overlord and we become its pet. Now, that sounds pretty scary, but don’t we treat our pets better than we treat other humans in the world? Think about it. The pet is kept warm and fed and happy. And would you do that for a homeless person in the street? A person of your own species? Probably not. So if we’re the pet for the superintelligence, what about the chicken? How bad could it be?

STEVEN BARTLETT: We used to have chickens when we were younger, and I watched my Nigerian mother chase that chicken around the garden, grab it, pull its head off and cook it.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Wow. Okay. Yeah. Oh, you worried that it’s going to do that for us? We’re going to run around?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Not all my pets made it.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Not all the pets survive. Yeah, it depends on whether it needs us to be alive or dead. We have to be relevant to it in some way. Maybe we’ll be court jesters, which will be entertainment. Until then, I don’t know that this is some special moment. I do a lot of reading of history, and throughout history, most occasions, especially in the era of the Industrial Revolution, people think they’re living in a special moment. So I’m not going to be that guy who says today is special because everyone has thought they were in a special moment.

The Economics of Space Exploration

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what do you think is the probability of me getting to another planet in my lifetime?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Zero. Zero. Really? Yeah. You want to know why? Yes, please. Yeah, it’s just zero.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I thought SpaceX going to go to Mars.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I have an unorthodox view on this, so you don’t have to believe me, but my read of history tells me that we only do big expensive things if there’s a geopolitical reason for it, either an economic reason or a defense reason, not just because it’s the next thing to do.

And when we went to the moon, realize in 1961, May 25, President Kennedy, just six weeks after Yuri Gagarin flew around the Earth in orbit and we didn’t have a ship that wouldn’t blow up on the launch pad that could carry humans, yet he called a joint session of Congress and says if the events of recent weeks couldn’t even utter the man’s name, the events of recent weeks, and I paraphrase, are any indication of the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere. Then we need to show the world the path of freedom over the path of tyranny. It’s a battle cry against communism.

The godless Russians in the whole Soviet Union, we were losing a technological race. And that was the battle cry that prompted Congress to write the check. Oh, later on he says, oh, it’ll be put a man on the moon and return him to safely Earth. And oh, that’s all beautiful. Let’s hold hands. That’s so beautiful. No one ever spent scads of money just because it was a cool thing to do. That has never happened ever.

So we go to the moon. People forgetting why we went to the moon say while we’re on the moon, at this rate, we’ll be on Mars by 1985. That’ll be the next ambitious goal we’ll take on. No, because we didn’t just go to the moon because that was the next thing to do. We went to the moon to beat the Russians. And when we got to the moon and we looked over our shoulder and the Russians weren’t there, we canceled the Apollo program. 1970. We haven’t been back to the moon in 53 years. We canceled it. Apollo 18 was ready to fly. It’s now in captivity in Huntsville, Alabama, in a museum on its side. It’s fascinating to walk the full length of it all rocket flight ready parts. It never flew. We ended it at Apollo 17.

No, we didn’t go to Mars because we didn’t have geopolitical reasons to do so, neither economic nor for defense reasons. Historically, people explored, did expensive things for the glory of God and royalty. Very expensive. The pyramids, the honor of royalty, okay, the church building, cathedral building, all of these activities were in the glory of power, deity and royalty. None of that happens today. We’re past that. The power of kings and gods, that doesn’t happen. Nobody dislodges major resources, capital resources of a nation in the interest of a God or a king anymore, okay? It’s secular. And secular means it’s money or it’s war because you feel threatened.

Okay, so we’re going back to the moon now, Project Artemis. Did you ever think to stop and ask why? Why did we stay on the moon in 1972? Why don’t we go back in 1980 or 1990, 2000, 2010. Oh, all of a sudden, let’s go back to the moon. Wouldn’t that be cool? Do you know when Artemis began in the late teens, right about when China says we’re going to put Taikonauts on the moon. Taikonauts. Chinese astronaut. All right, that’s when we saw let’s go back to the moon. What a good idea. Let’s do that really, because it’s just a good idea because we’re a little bit spooked by a friendly foe across the around the world might get the glory of that exercise. And once again, it’s a godless country, okay? Communism is godless by design, by construct. So here we are, going back to the moon. All right?

What motivation do we have to go to Mars? Are there oil wells there? Is there diamond mines? We’re not going to Mars. We’re just not. Unless China says they want to put military bases on Mars. We’re going to be at Mars in 10 months. One month to design, build and fund the thing and nine months to get to Mars. A geopolitical force operating.

Oh, and by the way, NASA doesn’t have a rocket that’ll get us to Mars. They think they do, but I don’t really have one yet time to do that and say, well, did anybody have a rocket? Elon says I have a rocket. So if Elon rocket goes to Mars, it’s not because he sends it there, it’s because taxpayers sent it there. By the way, he could go there on a vanity project, but there’s no business case. He could fly to Mars, team up with Jeff Bezos, they can send people to Mars. It’s not a business case. And if you are an investor in his company. You would not agree to do that. You wouldn’t. But he doesn’t need investors because he’s very wealthy. He could do it on his own. Are you going to Mars as a tourist? Is that a business case? It’s a trillion dollars to get to Mars. First. Second will be a little less. I don’t see that happening.

STEVEN BARTLETT: A trillion dollars.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: About that, yeah. If Earth were a schoolroom globe with your fist, show me where you think the moon is. This is Earth. Take your fist and put it at the distance the moon is. Your fist is about the right size compared. Okay. I mean, right there.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay. Not too bad. It’s 30 feet away. It’s in the next room.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay. 30 feet away.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That’s the moon. Let’s keep going. How far away from Earth did the Bezos Branson rockets go?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, not far.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: The thickness of two dimes above the surface of the Earth. How far away is Mars? It’s a mile away.

STEVEN BARTLETT: From here?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yes. From this Earth, it’s a mile away. The moon? 30 feet away. Mars, a mile away? Yeah. It’s a trillion dollars to Mars. Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How long?

Understanding Black Holes and the Fabric of Space-Time

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Nine months. And you have to wait till the planets are configured so that when you travel, you arrive where Mars will be when you get there. And that’s a minimum energy orbit. If you have filling stations along the way, you can just fill up with fuel and get there as fast as you want. But minimum energy orbit takes about nine months. And then to come back, you have to wait till it’s configured again a few years later. So a round trip to Mars is three or five years easily.

So there’s not an economic case. I’m not saying we don’t know how to get to Mars. We have a SUV sized rover there now. All right? Discovering potential life from a billion years ago. It’s not like we don’t know how to get to Mars. This is not a technological statement I’m making. I’m talking about a practical statement. So, no. My read of history tells me no.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I thought you were also going to add to that, that even if Elon wanted to do it as a vanity project because he makes all this money and manages to use Starlink as a way to fund it, whatever that. The problem is, Elon’s going to die. He’s going to die in the next couple of decades, which means the vanity element that comes from his childhood situation where he wanted to get out there and explore the stars, because he read that book, has got 30 years, 40, 50 years left on it.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, that would make him want to hurry, wouldn’t it? Yeah, yeah. And plus, he said, “I don’t want to die on Earth, I want to die on Mars.” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the idea. So that’s a goal, sure. But don’t tell me it’s a business case.

I can see a tourist case going into orbit and even possibly visiting the moon. It’s three days there, three days back. That’s a week’s vacation that you would take. And I would save up 5 years, 10 years of vacation money if that was the amount that it would take to go to the moon for one week. That would be really fun. Bucket list item for me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You know you’ve written this, you’ve revised this book?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh yeah, just visiting this plan. Yeah, I wrote a column, a question and answer column for 10 years, 15 years where people just ask me questions from the public. And I had a pen name called Merlin. And Merlin was friends with Newton and Galileo and Marie Curie and all these people. So if you ask Merlin, “Dear Merlin, I don’t quite understand gravity,” Merlin would say, oh, Merlin had a conversation with Isaac Newton in his backyard and here’s how he answers that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think in the book you talk about a golf ball sized black hole would weigh more than Earth and swallow it whole, leaving behind something the size of a lime.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, slightly bigger. Right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is… You’ve been asked this many times, but I still don’t know the answer, what is a black hole? And how do we even know if they’re real if no one’s ever been to one?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, you can know things without visiting them. I mean, that’s… The methods and tools and machines of science are remarkable in their ability to learn something without actually having to see it with your eyes or hear it with your ears or to touch it with your fingers.

We have… In fact, science didn’t take off until these machines became a fundamental part of how we investigated the world, replacing our five senses. Because there’s nothing more feeble in this world than you thinking you understand reality through your five senses. That I don’t want to call it feeble. I would call it error prone. Error prone.

Remember I told you about escape velocity of Earth? Yeah. You remember what I, the value?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I said it was 7 miles per…

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Second, paid attention a minute per second per second. That’s very fast. Seven miles per… So the adage “what goes up must come down.” It’s not true. It’s true for almost anything you would experience. But you can launch something at 7 miles per second, it’ll never ever come back. That’s the escape velocity for Earth.

Okay, if Earth had more mass and the gravity were stronger, the escape velocity is higher. That would make sense because there’s more gravity that you have to escape. Let’s keep up that exercise. Cram in more and more mass. Just keep doing that. Escape velocity keeps going up. Eventually the escape velocity hits the speed of light.

At that point, light can’t even escape. Light is the fastest thing in the universe if light can’t escape. If you fall in, you don’t escape either. There’s no better description of a hole than that. And worse yet, it’s a hole in any direction you approach it. Not just a hole in the street or in the floor. It’s a three dimensional hole.

And how do we know it’s there? Because it distorts the fabric of space and time around it. We see galaxies behind concentrations of matter, black holes. And the shape of the galaxy is distorted because Einstein tells us that gravity distorts the fabric of space and time. That’s one way we discover black holes.

Another way is most stars in the night sky are binary and multiple star systems. Most of them you can’t see it because you just have human vision. You whip out a telescope, you see, oh my gosh, there are two stars, not just one. If there’s a pair of stars and one of them becomes a black hole, and this one ages, it expands, and some of its material spills onto and orbits around the event horizon of the black hole. This swirling material gets hotter and hotter and hotter and it radiates X rays and ultraviolet. We have X ray and ultraviolet telescopes that see every one of these in the night sky.

STEVEN BARTLETT: They’re all black holes and it’s created from an explosion.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: There’s a star that wants to explode, but has so much mass the explosion doesn’t overcome the gravity and the star collapses down on itself to make a black hole. There’s one way to make a black hole.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So our sun will not…

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That’s not going to become… It’s pretty wimpy in that department. It’ll still kill us, but for different reasons.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So the mass of the object is so big that it can’t actually explode because the gravitational pull inwards is so strong?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Correct. That’s above a certain threshold. Within there there’s the stars that the explosion is greater than what the gravity can contain and it makes a supernova. And those are the stars that spread heavy elements across the galaxy, enabling us to even exist.

The Interconnectedness of All Life

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m going to read this again. A golf ball sized black hole would weigh more than Earth and swallow it whole. Leaving behind something the size of a lime.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah. So when black holes eat, they get bigger. So lime is bigger than a golf ball, but not by very much. We can calculate what the size is.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Where would everything go?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It’s in there. It’s compressed down inside the hole.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And if I was… And everything near, it’s going to get pulled in there as well.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: If it comes too close, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: If it comes too close, yeah, you…

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Can stay, you can keep your distance. Black holes, they’re not giant sucking devices. I mean, if you keep your distance. If the sun became a black hole right now, we would still orbit it. The gravity we feel at our distance is no different.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You say that if the sun suddenly shut off, we’d freeze at minus 462 Fahrenheit, which is the background temperature of the universe. Yes, once the stored energy ran out. Yeah, once the stored energy where ran out?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, in this… In the… Well. So there’s the sun’s energy. The sun blotted out. But Earth has energy inside of itself as well. This is what gives us volcanoes and continental drift and all the rest of this. So if you don’t have a sun, you want to live near a volcano or something that is a source of energy for you, and then you’ll live on Earth until the Earth’s energy died out. Ideally by then you just go to another planet. I mean, why not?

STEVEN BARTLETT: How long has our sun got left?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: About another 5 billion years.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How would we know?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It’s a good question. That’s the product of 20th century modern astrophysics. Then it was modern, I think of it as modern, where you say, what kind of star is this? You look around the universe for other stars that are just like it. And then you see those stars in their stages of evolution, stars being born, living out their lives and dying, and the star changes its properties from birth to death.

And so you can line up what, where the sun is in that chart. And then, plus, we know how old Earth is, so we directly measure the age of the Earth. And so there’s no reason to think that Earth did not form at the same time the sun did.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Another really fascinating one was every breath you take contains molecules once inhaled by every human in history.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That can’t be true.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: ChatGPT it? No. So here it is. You ready?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: There are more molecules of air in a single breath of air than there are breaths of air in Earth’s entire atmosphere. So… So if you breathe in and then breathe out, there’s enough molecules that you breathed out to populate every breath that anyone will ever again take on this Earth.

And air mixes rather quickly. Okay, so it has to mix. It’s not immediately. Give it some time, but you give it some time. There are molecules that went in and out of your lungs that are in China being breathed by people there. When enough time has elapsed, you can calculate that it’s years, 10 years, something like that. There’s tremendous mixing of air.

So how’s that for feeling kinship with others? Same with water. You drink water. There are more molecules of water in a glass of water. This is a mug of water, than there are mugs of water in all the world’s oceans. So you drink a mug of water and then it comes out of you in any one of a half dozen different ways. There’s enough molecules to scatter into every other mug of water in the world. So someone gets a mug of water, your molecules will be plenty more. Plenty of molecules to go.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if I do a big inhale, I’m also… I’m inhaling air that contains molecules that all of my living relatives once inhaled.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yes, and go further back. Jesus inhaled him. Muhammad.

STEVEN BARTLETT: With every breath.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yes, every breath. This is the oneness of it all. That’s why it’s a beautiful thing, astrophysics. I wouldn’t live without it.

The Cosmic Perspective

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think it makes us kinder learning about the universe, or do you think it makes us more nihilistic and narcissistic?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: No, if you learn about it as you should, you shouldn’t be nihilistic. There’s no force of nihilism in the knowledge, wisdom and insight you get by studying the universe. You will never find marching armies led by astrophysicists to go slaughter one another. The cosmic perspective prevents that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The cosmic perspective, yeah.

Human Physiology and Evolutionary Perspective

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: By the way, if you look at the chapter titles in there, they’re each pairs of words that we’ve all used. But we’ve argued over many of them over our Thanksgiving dinner. I don’t know if there’s a version of Thanksgiving in the UK. Maybe it’s just Christmas. Everybody gathers and the crazy uncles and aunts come in and you got to argue with them about, you know, and then you’re reminded why you only see them once a year.

The topics in there: color and race is in there, law and order, body and mind, meatarians and vegetarians, life and death. A lot of reflective moments in there. So this book, though, it’s all these topics that people fight about. Its goal is to say, you think that and you think that. You got to look at it this way. It’s not meat in the middle. No, it’s meat on a plane of existence above what you’re arguing. And you’ll look down on what you’re arguing and realize how ridiculous it is. That’s the goal of that book.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Chapter 10 of the book says human physiology may be overrated. What do you mean by that?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, you know, we like to think of ourselves at the top of evolutionary properties, but it’s really your mind, surely, but not much else. It’s odd because we always imagine aliens having humanoid bodies. And there’s no reason for that if they come from another planet.

Most life on Earth doesn’t have a humanoid body. The banana doesn’t have a humanoid body. And you have DNA in common with it. You don’t have any DNA in common with an alien from another planet, yet it’s walking around with a neck, eyes, nose, mouth, head, ears, shoulders, arms, fingers, kneecaps, feet. Really? Is that your best imagination that you can come up with? Alien from another planet?

The Infinite Universe

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is the universe infinite? I’ve often wondered that. Does it just go on forever or is there a…

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: We’re not given reason to think it doesn’t. But our horizon has an edge.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What we can see.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, but there’s no reason to think so. You’re a ship at sea, you have a horizon. Are you saying, well, that’s the extent of the ocean? No, because if you sail towards the horizon, more horizon shows up and you keep that up until you hit land.

So in the universe, we have our horizon, and if we went to that horizon, we’d have a whole other horizon beyond that. If we travel to that horizon, there’d be a whole other horizon there. The question is, how far does that go? We don’t know. We have no idea. It’s simpler mathematically to think it goes forever. It’s curious how there’s some equations where infinities work just fine in the equation. So we don’t know. We can talk about to our own horizon. That’s it.

UFOs vs. Aliens: The Critical Distinction

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s so many people saying that they’ve seen aliens. We had someone on this podcast, actually, that said they’d seen aliens. Not they’d seen aliens, but they had evidence that aliens existed and they worked in the military and said that they’d, you know, some of these spacecraft footage that you…

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Did they show you the alien?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, but you see the videos of the things bouncing around in the sky.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, fuzzy videos.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Fuzzy videos.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So those are UFOs, they’re not aliens.

STEVEN BARTLETT: UFOs, yeah.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: There’s a difference.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh yeah.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Many people equate the two. But if you see something in the sky and you don’t know what it is, it’s a UFO. And what does the U stand for? Unidentified. Until you can identify it, it’s a UFO. And because it does things that you don’t understand, you cannot equate that with it being an alien. You just said you don’t know what it is.

Wow, that’s amazing. I don’t know what it is, therefore it must be an alien. Once you just said you don’t know what it is, that’s the end of the sentence. You can’t go on and say, therefore it must be anything. You can be impressed with videos that have no explanation. I don’t have a problem with that. But you want to turn around and say aliens. You want to say it’s a government cover up.

Do you really think the government is that competent? Often the same people who say there’s a masterminded government are the same people who complain that the government is a bloated bureaucracy, inefficient bureaucracy that should be replaced by private enterprise. They’re the same people making those same statements. So I love the aliens. I want to meet them too. My people, the astrophysics community, has been searching for…

STEVEN BARTLETT: Aliens for decades and you’ve never found evidence of any?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So the community of amateur astronomers in the world, amateur astronomy is, that’s a badge of honor because it means you know the night sky and you own a telescope. And it’s not like amateur neurosurgeon. You don’t want to go to an amateur neurosurgeon, but you want to know the night sky, go to an amateur astronomer.

Amateur astronomers know the night sky. They know what the sun, moon and stars are doing every night. They know they’re very good at climate and weather because that affects whether things are visible. So they know when weather systems come in and go out and what things look like.

You would think if aliens were about, up and about, that amateur astronomers would have seen more of them than anyone else. But they’ve seen less because we know what we’re looking at. It’s kind of that simple. The moment you know what you’re looking at, it’s an IFO, isn’t it? It’s not a UFO.

And so, yeah, I want to meet the aliens, but you’re going to show me fuzzy video. Or you’re going to say you have an alien, but it’s in a locked box and you’re not going to show it. If you have an alien in a locked box and you’re not going to show it, that’s the same thing to a scientist as not having an alien at all.

The Case for Extraterrestrial Life

STEVEN BARTLETT: Could you make the case for why aliens probably do exist and also the case for why they probably don’t exist?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: No, no, they surely exist in this universe. The universe is 14 billion years old, and the ingredients of life on Earth are the most common ingredients in the universe. And life began on Earth almost as quickly as it possibly could have. When Earth finally cooled down after it being formed, it was by 200 million years for signs of single celled life.

So even though we can’t duplicate that yet, we don’t know how, that’s a frontier of biology. Earth didn’t seem to have problems getting the job done within 200 million years. That’s Earth. Now you have exoplanets everywhere across the galaxy. To suggest that life on Earth is alone in the universe, you’d have to have some point of philosophy that requires you believe that because it’s not derived from actual evidence or observations of the universe itself.

So aliens, usually people mean intelligent aliens. But we’re happy to find any kind of life at all. Bacterial life, that would be, that would transform biology.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about in our galaxy, in the Milky Way galaxy?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, the galaxy is the most sensible place to. So we’ve looked, we’ve looked for exoplanets. So a planet orbiting another star. Because if you’re going to look for life, we presume it’s going to be on a planet. So if this table is the galaxy and the solar system would be about right there. We’ve searched a circle about this big for exoplanets.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what’s the solar system versus…

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It’s just the sun and its planets. Oh, okay, yeah, solar system. And then that’s our solar system there. And we are part of several hundred billion stars in the galaxy. And this galaxy is one of perhaps as many as a trillion galaxies in the observable universe. So to say we’re alone, that’s just you being, you’re being philosophically irresponsible.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So this table is the galaxy?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, if it were the galaxy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And we searched a coin.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Coin, yes, that’s a good word to use. A coin sized volume of this galaxy. We’ve searched for exoplanets and by association, life. So folks at the SETI Institute, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, they come up with an analogy. But people have said, well, we haven’t found life yet, so maybe there’s no life anywhere. And we say, no, take a cup and scoop it into the ocean. That’s like saying, hmm, the ocean has no whales in it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that the equivalent?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, it’s equivalent in terms of the space of searching, because it’s not only in physical space, but it’s in time. Suppose aliens sent radio signals to us and they arrived 2,000 years ago. Do the Romans have radio telescopes? No, but we would all count them as intelligent. So communication requires intelligence and technology. How long have we had technology to do that?

Probability of Life in the Milky Way

STEVEN BARTLETT: 80 years. On the court chance of probability, do you think there are aliens in the Milky Way galaxy?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, oh, sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You think there are?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I don’t see why not. It’s a calculation you can do. I did it with two colleagues of mine. We have about 100 civilizations in the galaxy alive now. That’s not many out of the total number of stars, but again, a civilization has to evolve out of whatever it was. That’s a tiny little slice of time relative to how long the planet has been there.

STEVEN BARTLETT: A hundred different living… I’ll pause on the word living, because living can mean many things.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, I mean, Mars might have had life, but it would be dead today on the surface. So we’re looking for living civilizations.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And does that excite you?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yes, completely. But you want to now tell me it has visited you with fuzzy lights in the sky. And no one has brought forth an alien. I need better evidence because you’re making an extraordinary claim.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Humans’ fascination with meeting these aliens when we’ve got crazy species we’ve never met on our own planet.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That’s a good point. And plus, what do we need real aliens for when we have Hollywood? The funny part to me is we have no knowledge that aliens want to harm us. But we do have knowledge that humans want to harm humans.

And any encounter between an advanced civilization and one that was less advanced in the history of exploration has never boded well for the less advanced civilization. So for me, we are describing aliens not as we think they would be, but as we know we are to one another. It’s a mirror.

Human Nature and First Contact

STEVEN BARTLETT: And we’ve only got to play out what we would do as well if we found an alien civilization. What would humans do? I mean, I think we’d go and try and steal some of them and bring them here.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, no, they’re probably smarter than us. That’s like worms saying, oh, we found some humans. What should we do with them? Should we corral them? No. If aliens came here, they clearly are more advanced than we are because we haven’t left low Earth orbit in 53 years. So if they cross the galaxy to visit us, oh, we’re going to shoot a gun at them. They’ll laugh at us.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You know, in all the movies though, we beat them. That’s so funny. I’ve never thought about that before.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That…

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, we just shoot guns at them.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You shoot guns at them. And did it really make a difference? You know, we put Brad Pitt or whoever…

STEVEN BARTLETT: Tom Cruise. What’s your favorite space movie?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Space movie? Well, sci-fi is The Matrix.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I love everything about it. The story is tight. There’s one physics error in it, but without it they don’t have a movie. So you got to give them a hall pass, which I feel that I have the power to do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What was the error? Everyone’s going to be wondering what the error was in the…

The Matrix and the Laws of Thermodynamics

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, it’s not an error, it’s just they got bad physics in it. Okay, so if you remember, the AI computer that’s running everything needs an energy source. And so they’re growing humans in these pods knowing that each human radiates at about 80 watts. They didn’t give that number, but it’s a true fact. 80 watts, like an 80 watt bulb. That’s how much energy you are consuming and using. It’s an energy rate. Okay, so they… and one of the writers must have known that. And so that’s kind of cool. Let’s use humans as an energy source for the machines.

All right, so there are these pods of humans, and they grow the humans from childhood to adulthood. And they put in their head a world that they’re living in, which is just in their head. And they think it’s real, but it’s not. That’s the Matrix.

Okay, but wait a minute. How do the humans get their energy? They feed the humans food. Well, why are you feeding food to humans and then using the energy from the humans for the machine? Bypass the middleman and just feed the machine something called the second law of thermodynamics. First or second law of thermodynamics. And anytime energy changes from one form to another, it’s not 100% efficient.

You drive a car. If you drive a combustion engine car, you drive it 50 miles, get out, the engine’s hot. Where did the heat come from? That’s wasted energy. Converting chemical energy of the gasoline to kinetic energy of your car. It is never 100% perfect. So they are losing energy with this middleman, and they should just feed themselves whatever the food they’re feeding the humans. And if they’re smart, they would not have humans at all. But then there’s no movie, so that’s my point. Wrote a “Mahal pass.” You’re okay with that?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you an easy person to watch movies like this?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, I’m not. I’m not the guy you think I am. I will watch it, and silently. Yes, I’ll gather a list of… but I’m silent about it. And if you’re interested, I will tell you later.

The One Outstanding Question

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the one outstanding question, if there is one, that you’re desperate to know the answer to?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I don’t live life that way.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Really?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah. It’s a sensible question that you’re asking me. I don’t want to diminish the sensibility of it, but I want to say that that’s not how I view the world. The world is not “there’s the one question I need answered.” The world is “what do I need to learn so that I’m standing in a place I can yet imagine, asking a question I have yet to think of?”

In other words, as the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance. And so you say “what one question?” No, there’ll be a bunch of questions. The area grows some more. I’m standing in a new place now. There’s a question I didn’t even think could be asked before. And that’s the question that matters there and then. But then there’s another question later on as this frontier continues to advance.

So I don’t think about the one question or the two questions that matter. I think about questions yet to be dreamt of that we don’t even see because we haven’t taken the frontier to that vista yet. And so, yeah, some of that’s unknowable, but I kind of like that.

There’s the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. One of the poems, I don’t remember all the lines, but the one that matters to me most is “Learn to love the questions themselves.” You’re trying to find answers and I’m trying to find the questions.

STEVEN BARTLETT: “Learn to love the questions themselves.” This kind of brings me back to the top of the conversation where I was talking about, I’ve got a lot more questions these days.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It’s good. Love it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Sometimes it’s difficult.

Valid and Invalid Questions

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And not all questions can be answered given the state of knowledge. Some questions are illegitimate questions. Not all questions are legit questions. For example, at what temperature does the number 7 melt? What kind of cheese is the moon made out of? These are… just because the nouns and verbs are lined up and there’s a question mark doesn’t mean the… and by the way, when you’re facing the unknown, you don’t know if your question later on would look that ridiculous. What separates the great scientist from the average scientist is that they’re clued into what questions to ask.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think we hurt ourselves by asking these invalid questions?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: No, no. You don’t know if it’s invalid. I know the moon is not made out of cheese today. I know that because we’ve been there. We brought back moon rocks. So today that question is invalid. But if you never imagined ever going to the moon and you don’t know anything about physics or rocks and you look up and it looks like a hunk of cheese, you’re eating a completely legit question.

Meaning, Religion, and Personal Truth

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s a bit of a conversation raging in my friendship circle at the moment about religion and meaning. And what’s the point? Should we be arguing about these things about meaning, religion? Is there any better…

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I think meaning is a very personal thing to people. So why should you jump in the middle of their attempt to establish meaning in their life? We’re all very different people and so meaning ought to be different. If meaning was the same for everyone, you just publish it. Everyone reads it and then we all have meaning. No, you got to make it yourself. Some people want to search for it, fine. I don’t have a problem with that.

I’m not searching for meaning. I’m creating meaning in my life because I can control that. Not that it’s important to control everything. You know, I like magic as an adult because it reminds me I can still be fooled. Okay, that’s… so I don’t need to know everything. I just need to maintain curiosity. And you’ve got kids, 29 and 25.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that the most meaningful thing you’ve done in your life, raising kids?

Raising Scientifically Literate Children

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, it’s among the more meaningful things that I would say. They did a lot of their own raising because they’re highly independent, and so there’s a limit to how much I should take credit for who and what they have become. There are a lot of what they did themselves.

But my wife, who’s a scientist, she’s a mathematical physicist, we made sure that both our kids were scientifically literate at an early age, by age 13, certified. So at that point, I said, “I don’t care what grade you get from now on, I don’t care. I know no one will exploit you for your lack of curiosity and knowledge about the objective universe.”

And, you know, we’d be at a dinner party, and they’re in middle school, right? And someone says, “Oh, I had a bad day because Mercury was in retrograde.” And my son would say, “What actually happened to you today? Has that happened on days when it was…” They know how to ask questions.

Okay. By the way, if you just reject what someone says outright, that’s as intellectually lazy as it is to accept what they say outright. What’s harder, but I think more fun, is lining up a series of questions to probe the statement, to explore what is going on in the thoughts and in the claims of the person with whom you’re conversing.

So if someone says, “I have these crystals, and you rub them together, it’ll heal you.” My kids would say, “What are the crystals made of? And what tests have you made for this? And could be… could the healing have been explained in another way? And in what way are the…” And they start asking these questions, and then the person will probably just walk away because they would not have the answers to all of them. And then, you know, that’s… remember I said, if an argument lasts more than five minutes, then both sides are wrong. The person… there’s nothing. There’s no place for that to go.

To the truly curious person, here’s another interesting fact. Crystals represent the lowest energy state of the atomic or molecular configuration that is comprised of the lowest energy state. So people say, “I have crystal energy.” No, you don’t. You have the lowest energy state of that, of that silicon dioxide that you’re calling quartz. There is no, there’s no energy you’re going to take out of it. It is in its lowest energy state.

These are people who have never had chemistry. And as an educator, I don’t want to make fun of this, but when people think they know something and are audacious about it, when in fact they don’t, that makes it much harder for an educator to break through horoscopes.

The Rise of Astrology Among Gen Z

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, I’ve got some stats for you here, Neil. Surveys find that roughly 80% of Gen Z believe in astrology to some degree. 72% of those Gen Z and millennials allowed astrology to influence major life decisions like romance, health, work and education. And many Gen Z’s now are checking their horoscopes weekly.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, we live in a free country, so I’m not going to try to stop them. What would be sad is if that number got to 100% and then you wouldn’t be generating scientists or engineers or people who… the objective truths of the world matter. And then the civilization just goes back to the cave where everything that happened in the natural world was mysterious, created by forces beyond our knowledge and understanding.

And this is the title of one of Carl Sagan’s books, “The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.” That was the subtitle of that book. So if you want to think you’re not in control of your fate because the sun, moon and planets are, like I said, it’s a free country.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there anything that you’ve learned that the universe does to influence us?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah. The sun rises and I wake up because I want to be awake during the day. Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That people aren’t…

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah. The tide comes in and I move my beach chair back because the tide came in. Yeah. There are things that influence my behavior. Yes. But it’s not much more than that. Earth is tipped on its axis, so we have seasons. I buy coats and wear them in the winter. That influences my behavior.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s your star sign?

The Astrologer’s Prediction

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, I once had someone take a class of mine at the Hayden Planetarium that I taught on astrophysics. And at the end, she, like the second to last class, she came and said, “Oh, thank you, thank you for the class. I’m enjoying the class. But I want you to know I’m an astrologer and I’m taking the class so I can cast horoscopes better.”

So I said, “It’s really working for you.” She said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She said, “For example, what’s your horoscope sign?” And I said, “Shouldn’t you be able to figure that out? If all this works and you cast horoscopes, you ought to tell me what my sign is.”

She said, “Are you Gemini?” I said, “No.” “Cancer?” I said, “No.” “It must be Leo.” I said, “No.” Eight horoscopes later, she gets the correct answer and says, “I knew it.”

So I’m simply saying that her ninth guess out of 12 was correct, and she declares, “I knew it.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why do people want to believe in things like this?

The Need for Answers

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I think they want the world to still have mysteries because mysteries are beautiful things. However, the world still has mysteries. They’re just different mysteries from whatever there used to be. And so follow the mysteries where they take you.

And there’s another branch of all of us who must have answers to every question because they’re not learning to love the questions. They only want to love an answer. So they say, “What was around before the big bang?” I said, “I don’t know. We got top people.” “Something had to be around.” I said, “I don’t know.” “Must have been God.”

So there’s their answer, and then they’re happy. “What happens after death?” Well, it looks like you rot in the ground, but otherwise, I mean, that’s what physics… “It’s got to be something. Your soul.” I said, “There’s got to be God. Heaven.” That’s their answer. They’ve got their answer.

And if that’s your answer at every turn you make, you’re not as good an investigator of the unknown because you just invented the answer to the unknown. You’re content. “What is dark matter?” “I don’t know. We got top people working.” “Is that the spirit of God?”

If you say it’s God and then you’re done, then you’re not very useful in the lab. I don’t mind if you want to say it’s God, but don’t let that stop your curiosity.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Those people seem to be happier and healthier, though, which is the surprising thing. Religious people.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, again, it could be because they believe there’s a God that tells them who to sleep with and where to eat and how to pray, or because they have a regular dose of community. I don’t know that those are completely separable variables. There are people who they love and care about that they see every week, which is not happening with so many people today.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think you would be happier if you believed in God?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I’m a pretty happy guy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think you’d be happier?

Religion and Atheism

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I don’t know. I see people, I’ve seen very happy people in celebrating their version of God. But then there are other people who are really happy in their version of God. And here’s the problem: deeply religious people typically find other religions, deeply religious people will declare for themselves and others in that religion that all the other religions are false. False. And if not false, just make preposterous claims.

It is so obvious to them how false all the other religions are. Now you go to this religion, it is obvious how preposterous the rest of the religions are. You go around religion to religion. And so what’s really going on here is devout people in so many of these religions are atheists to every religion but their own. Every religion but their own.

How can a mountain have moved to Muhammad? That can’t be. But yes, the creator of the universe impregnated a woman in the Middle East 2,000 years ago. That’s more believable than anything in the Quran for this person. And then the Jews, he’s saying, “You’re Jesus is the son of God. Were you crazy? Where’d you get that for? He’s a good Jew, nice prophet, but son of God, you’re going too far.”

So everybody’s saying what’s not true. So they’re atheists for every other. They just don’t believe any other religion. Whereas an actual atheist just has one more religion to that category. It’s your religion. The atheist agrees with you that all the other religions are preposterous in their claims, but they also believe, they also think your religion is preposterous. And people don’t accept that. They don’t. It doesn’t land well.

So I don’t have any problems with people being religious. I don’t have any issues with that. I don’t try to impose. My other people try to do it.

God of the Gaps

I have a quote where I misquoted just because they want me on their side. It’s a simple quote. If every time I tell you science doesn’t understand it and you say, “Well, God must be that. God made the universe because we don’t. God made life because we don’t know how to make life yet. God…” If that is your definition and understanding of God, then as science progresses, it will solve these questions, pushing the God back outward to places that have yet to be discovered.

And so the quote is, “If to you, God is where science has yet to tread, then God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance.” That references what philosophers have called “God of the gaps.” It goes way back, thousands of years. If we don’t understand it, there’s a God. The storm is Poseidon. Lightning bolt struck, is Zeus. That’s God of the gaps. God of the gaps is a time honored exercise in human civilization.

And all I’m saying is that statement is objectively true because it’s an if statement. If to you, God is where science has yet to tread, then as science continues to tread, you’re a pocket, a shrinking pocket of scientific… That’s your God. It’s not an opinion. There’s a statement of an if statement. The consequences of an if statement.

I’ve had people take the second half and put it on a T-shirt: “God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance. Neil deGrasse Tyson.” That is not what I said. That’s half of what I said. And that’s only true if to you, God is where science has yet to tread. But to pull that out and make that the truth, no, I would never make such a statement ever.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re 66, right?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Hang on, hang on. I will be 67 in a month. In a month. So a month from this recording.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I’m 33.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Half my age.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Exactly half. And I was wondering, you’re a very wise man. What is the advice that you wish someone had said to you at 33 that you could give to me now?

Life’s Lessons

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I have no such advice. And I’ll tell you why. If you’re alert and you’re smart, alert meaning you notice things and you’re smart and you learn, living life itself is the lesson.

So a version of what you just asked is, given what you know today, what would you tell yourself if you met yourself when you were 15, 20, 25, 30, whatever? And I said I wouldn’t tell him anything because if I gave a bit of wisdom to… I said, “You’re about to do that, but don’t do that.” There’s no better lesson than doing something and learning that you shouldn’t do it. That’s the best lesson.

We don’t live life because there’s a list of things that other people said don’t do. You’re going to explore your life. That’s what you’re going to do. And some things are great and some things you don’t want to do again, some things you’re bad. That’s where the wisdom comes from. You earn it. It’s the most, it’s the strongest kind of wisdom you can have, provided you learn from a mistake. If you’re just an idiot, you just keep making the mistake.

My advice for you is don’t make the same mistake twice. But that’s, you don’t need me for that. So you’ll make a decision about this podcast or some business decision. And no, it didn’t turn out right.

Here’s a better example of this. This is a very American kind of story I’m about to tell. Immigrant comes over, back when that was a thing you could do. Comes to the United States and they work hard, very hard working. They first sweep the street in front of a store, up front, and then they’re in the store and they learn the trade, and then the owner dies and they take over the trade, and they’re working hard and they’re scrapping and they can’t. And then they buy the adjacent store and they build the thing. And then he moves and he lives in a big house and he has kids.

And he says to himself, “When I was your age, I had to scrounge for food and I had to sweep things. And I want to make sure my kids don’t have to do that. I want to make sure they don’t have to do that.”

So you provide things for them so they don’t have to do this. And now they grow up and they’re adults and they’re deadbeats. They have no motivation, they have no ambition, they have no vision statement, because everything got handed to them. And what does the adult say to the kids? “Where did I go wrong? I gave you everything I didn’t have.”

That’s where they went wrong, because they gave the kids everything he didn’t have. And what made that person was what they struggled. The decisions they had to make, the decisions they got right, the decisions they got wrong, who they met, how they treated people. This is life experience.

And it doesn’t come on a bumper sticker. It doesn’t come on a “What’s the secret?” Just like going to someone’s home and one of the hosts is actually a trained chef, right? And maybe worked in a restaurant and they prepared this exquisite meal, and you said, “This is delicious. What’s your secret?” “Oh, the secret. I went to chef school for six years. That’s the secret.”

You’re thinking, this is one sentence I could tell you, and then you… That’ll make everything better. No, no. Just stay alert. Learn new stuff every day and learn from your mistakes, because those lessons are greater than someone just telling you to not do it. Then you have no such life experience to build into the wisdom that you want to acquire in the years to come.

STEVEN BARTLETT: My last question for you is… I hear it the other…

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I didn’t think you’d ever have a last question.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, yeah. I mean, for now. I should say my last question for now, but my last question for now, and I kind of hear it in between some of the things you say, is, and I’ve just moved here, so I’ve just moved to Los Angeles. How do you feel about America right now?

On American Leadership

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, you know, it’s a free country and we vote in our leaders. And right now there’s a whole set of people in charge that are doing different things from what had happened in previous years, previous leaderships, even previous leaders of that same political party. What’s going on is very different from anything that I think people would have predicted.

A lot of people like complaining about leadership, but we live in a country where we choose our leaders, so we’re going to complain about the leadership. You should be complaining about the people, about the electorate. I’m an educator. I’ve never complained about politicians. They represent people.

I was once in the Rayburn Office Building, Washington, DC, in the Science Committee’s room, beautifully decorated with science art and sculptures and things. One of the members of the Science Committee back then was a young Earth creationist. Young Earth creationist, universe created in six days. Earth created in 6,000 years, at most 10,000 years.

And I knew he was going to be there. And I thought to myself, do I grab him by the lapels and say, “What are you thinking? You’re on a science committee.” And then I thought, no, no. If he thinks that, presumably so does his electorate. They voted him in. And this electorate of fellow citizens, as am I in this country.

So I can’t indict him. Let me go have a conversation with the folks who voted for him. I said, “Why do you think this? And if you consider this…” That’s my duty as an educator, not to hit anybody on the head who’s in Washington.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So do we blame the educators and the media? People like, you know, people like me.

The Value of Basic Science

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That, no, the blame game is, I don’t feel that way. My parents, when they showed us the images of the dogs and the water hoses on the protesters in the South American south, they were never bitter. They said, these people don’t know any better, they don’t know any differently. You have to talk to them and teach them.

That’s very different from saying, holding up your fist saying, I’m going to fight them because they’re my enemy. It’s, I want to teach them because they’re my fellow citizens. And that’s how I feel.

So my worry is that there are decisions made that are not in the best interest of the people who voted for those decisions. The longer term implications could be devastating if you cut basic science. Basic science feeds engineering, engineering feeds economies.

And so if you don’t think basic science matters because you don’t either understand the title of the research or the scientists didn’t communicate it interestingly enough, whatever. And you say, this is a waste of money, take it all out, let’s just do the engineering. You’ll be ossified in place.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And is that what’s happened?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: We are on the brink of that happening right now. That’s correct.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The average person has no idea about this.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I’ve tried to illuminate the public about it. It’s easy to say that basic science doesn’t matter or can’t matter or will never matter, because we don’t know yet. Right now is the centennial decade. So let’s go back to the 1920s where quantum physics was developed.

If you were around back then, what would you have said? Why are you studying atoms and can’t even see atoms? Don’t waste your time. You’re a brilliant person. Go work on this other problem that we have in society. And it would take decades.

But the information technology revolution has as its core the creation, storage and retrieval of digital information that can only happen with the exploitation of the quantum. So this decade of science, physics that was discovered by the 1950s, it was like, whoa, this is some important physics here. No one would have known that at the time.

Why? Let me keep going. Was it 1876? Philadelphia Expo. Alexander Graham Bell showcases his new contraption, the telephone. And people say, wow, this is kind of cool. You should read what people wrote about it. This is a great invention. I can imagine there might be one in every city in the future in this book.

That one? Yeah. There’s a whole chapter called “Science and Technology” where I chronicle how people think about the technology of their day and how they always get it wrong when they predict the future. Because foundational science comes in at the bottom, and you don’t see that coming, and it gurgles its way up. Clever engineers apply it, and then you have an iPad.

The Power of Storytelling

STEVEN BARTLETT: Neil, thank you so much.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, thanks for having me back. This is our second time together.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It is.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: When you bought out the bookstore here, what’d you do?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yes. We wanted to come prepared. I mean, you write the most incredible books and you talk in the most incredible ways. I said this to you last time. But you’re one of the most incredible storytellers I’ve ever heard.

You make something which is, I really didn’t have a huge amount of interest in school, suddenly interesting to us as adults, which is a remarkable thing. So thank you for doing what you do. We do have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, is that right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yes.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And they don’t know who they’re leaving it for. The question left for you is, how good are you at knowing what you will regret? And is there anything you do regret?

On Regret and Growth

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah. I think regrets are things that you only realize when it’s too late. Otherwise, you would have preempted it and not have to regret it. So I don’t know that I’m any better than anyone else at it, because if you’re good at it, you’ll never be in a position to have to do something that you would regret.

The fact is, you went past something that you did and say, damn, I shouldn’t have done that. I got to regret that. So to be good at knowing in advance that you’re going to regret something, that’s almost an impossible scenario. If I’m good at seeing it, then I would never have to regret anything because I would have preempted it.

So for all of us, the fact that we have regrets is we move past something that we did. I was like, damn, I regret that after the fact.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you have any regrets?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I was in college, I majored in physics, and I think I was a junior. There were students that came in from other schools for a summer program. Okay, high school seniors, I think they were. They might have been freshmen in their college, but I think they were high school students.

And I was not a mentor, but I would guide them in these research projects. Then at the end, we had to write an evaluation of them. And as one student, I wrote an evaluation that was accurate but unnecessary.

I said, he pretends he knows things that he doesn’t, and he’s faking this. And I didn’t yet know how to speak encouragingly about someone separate from just speaking factually about someone. So is that an art? Is it a science to do that? I don’t know, but I know I didn’t have it at the time.

I just simply described what I saw and I said, this is not going to work. It was very deflating to him. And considering that at the time I’m majoring in physics at Harvard, he’s coming from some high school somewhere and I’m a Harvard student telling him that he ain’t shit, and I should not have done that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did he contact you later?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: No, he might have taken up another field. I don’t know. But so I regret that. But it would take me four years to even realize that that was a regrettable thing because I didn’t know how to, as an educator, you want to encourage people, you see where the weaknesses are and figure out ways to have that person eradicate them, improve upon them, rather than just say, this is not working. Go home.

I regret that. And that’s probably the thing I regret most in life.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Really?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah. Because it was, who knows what consequences that has on that person’s life.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you remembered that?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, yes. Oh, my gosh, yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do you remember that? Because you write it down in his report card or whatever on his assessment. Time goes on. Does something happen for you to think back to what you wrote?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, I’ve written many letters of reference for people, more than I can count. So I think every time I write a letter of reference, I think about how I could have written that letter back then. So that’s a regret. And I live with that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I can see you live with it.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah. So I think I made up for it just in how many people, and there are other people who needed help. And so you find out how they can improve it and advise on that so that everybody lifts up. That’s how you make a better world.

Finding Meaning in the Universe

STEVEN BARTLETT: And it goes back to what you said at the start you wanted on your tombstone, which is certainly something you’ve already done in droves, more so than I think anybody.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So you tell me I can die now? Is that what you just said? You just said that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Or you can go on holiday. It’s up to you. But thank you so much for being who you are. You’re a huge inspiration to me. I know Jack is a mega, mega fan of yours as well and loves your work. And you’re both the reason that I, well, I let go of my religious belief at 18 years old.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You don’t blame me for that?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I don’t want you to lose your…

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Religion because of me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, but I just said I let go of my religious belief at 18 years old and I became an atheist. Agnostic. Then I became really agnostic. But then I kind of fell in love with the universe.

And I fell in love in the universe because of you and because of Cosmos, which is one of my favorite things ever to watch. And I found all the curiosity and awe and magic that I needed to find by reading your work and watching the wonderful movies that you’ve made. So thank you so much for that.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, the universe is a rich repository of spiritual fulfillment. If I may.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yes, to say the least. Yeah. Wow. And your book is exactly that. I highly recommend. Everybody goes and checks it out. It’s out on, I think it’s the 21st of October.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, yeah, yeah. The next installment in Merlin. Yeah. In October. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ll link it on the screen.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, thank you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Link it below. Highly recommend.

Final Wisdom: Stay Humble

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It’s called “Just Visiting This Planet.” So I lied before. I can give you some advice.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Please.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Ready?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: This is 67 year old advice.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: At no time should you overvalue your own thoughts. You should allow yourself to be humbled daily with new ideas that challenge any or everything that you currently think. That’s wisdom. I think.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do I know who I am if I don’t hang on to it?

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Maybe you’re not. Maybe you only are who you are on your deathbed because then you would have completed your life. You’re still in work in progress. You’re 33.

So last year when you were 31, you would have lived your billionth second. Okay. And if you lead a healthy life, you should get 3 billion seconds out of it. You get to 93, at least that.

So time passes. If you learn something new every day, that forces extra context for extra perspective, new perspective on whatever you knew yesterday. You have to stay open to that.

And I read old science books because I watch people’s confidence that they had in what they thought they knew. It can be embarrassing in some cases. And it’s very humbling to look back at people writing about their own world.

There’s a book from 1899, the guy said on the sun and it says, “We’ve learned so much about the sun in the last three years. I had to up the edition of the book I wrote three years ago.” And I’m saying, you don’t know shit about the sun, okay? In 1899. But he’s feeling it. He’s feeling that joy.

So it keeps me humble on the frontier, on this perimeter of ignorance, because there’s way more to discover than anything you already learned.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Maybe that’s the antidote and medicine that society needs right now, too.

DR NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I think so. Because everybody is running things thinking they know better than everybody else.

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