Neil deGrasse Tyson - Are We Alone On Earth? The Truth About Aliens, UFOs, and Life on Mars | EP #118

29:23My bet still is on the vision that, you know, George Keoneal painted of large cylinders built from astronaut materials, that this point built by robotics and AI autonomously without humans in the loop, sort of creating ideal environments for us to go into and move into without having to worry about all of the issues of getting onto and off of the Martian surface. Yeah, so let me just say some supportive things of what you just said. The Drakeo Neo model, as you noted, has the advantage that you park one of these at a Lagrangian point or somewhere in orbit and so itself does not have much of any of a gravitational well.

30:11So you just sort of slide up next to it and disembark and since it's rotating, as a rotating cylinder, everybody lives on the inner surface of that cylinder and it's rotated to 1G. You don't have the bone loss problems or any of the health problems related to lower G as you would have on the moon as you would have on Mars, which is those kinds of challenges were thoroughly explored in the TV series sci -fi story, Expans. If you look at any expanse episodes, people live on Mars, people live on asteroids, and their bones are weaker and they can't travel from one place to another because they were born and raised in these different sources of gravity.

30:57And earth in that mix has the heaviest gravity, so the earth people tend to be sort of sturdier than everybody else. So there's been some sci -fi people that have thought about this. It's completely bypassed when you have a rotating system. So the question would be how idyllic will you make this such that everyone will just want to go. Will it be like, oh, the new world is so amazing. Everybody get in a ship and board one way and you'll get off and you'll never come back. Is that what you for see and how much time? Yeah, so I do for see one way missions. In fact, I've done this in the lecture halls at universities typically for young graduate students or early 20s, asking how many of you would go on a one way mission to the Martian surface?

31:43And before their married or before their responsibilities, the percentage of hands that go up in the audience is pretty large, close to 50%. But there was the project Mars won, do you remember that? Yeah, I do remember. What I'm dropped was the entrepreneur. He's Dutch, which was interesting because I said, how does a Dutch person get involved in this? And then I realized there was a Dutch East India trading company. They were early out of the box. in this, let's explore the unknown business. And of course, they have since gone out of business, even though they had many supporters, many funders.

32:21We had, I had Baz Launcherup on my podcast, it's in our archives. And the, we interviewed one of the people who did sign up. He was a young kind of geeky guy, like science. And we asked him. And I said, so you really wanna go one way on this trip and he said, and he said, yes. And I said, aren't you married? And he said, yes, well, what is your wife say about this? And he said, oh, she's encouraged it. And I said, okay. You don't understand what's going on in your marriage. Good riddance, good riddance. So yeah, I get that. But, and maybe Elon with his, you know, starship is that's a first step.

33:05But to say we will have robotic AI mining asteroids building colonies Enough for all of us to move there and live there on what time scale are you imagining this by the way Jerk H. O 'Neill imagined all of this by the 21st century. Yeah, he wrote his books in the mid late 80s and

33:29High frontier high frontier was earlier was in the mid 70s. You're right. You wrote So I wrote a 2084, which is just follow on. I mean, I see this occurring in the next 30 years, which might be completely ridiculous on your time scale, but I think that the abilities to do this will be there. By the 30 years ago was 1994. Yes. Just put your predictions in context. But we are on a nonlinear curve, I would say. Yes, we are. We'd love to talk about that. It's part of your professional identity to be on that exponential. That you made a career out of that. I did it for you. Thank you. But space has been here too for slow risk averse and so are the triggers.

34:19So are the triggers? And what our predictions were, but other things, by the way, not everything is on an exponential, but overall society is. That's the point. So if you look at the future that never was, everyone's visions of the future, you know, no, we don't have flying cars and all the rest of that because everyone imagined that energy would be cheap. But what the future brought was cheap information. So we have an information -driven economy more than an energy -driven, transportation -driven economy. and everything we have in our information world, nobody foresaw, okay? Even the best of the of the of the futurists.

35:02So okay, I mean, there's four sort of pieces of it, okay? But so our advances are not on the on the line that most people are drawing where they would rather have it be. But there are changes now. First of all, to point out that from May of 1961, when JFK said, you know, let's get to the moon through July of 1969 was extraordinary because of the will and because of the, you know, the 400 ,000 Americans that joined the Apollo Program of One Shaper Forum. And engineers and scientists, engineers, scientists, and politicians. But what we have today is 3D printing of rocket components. We do have the ability to AI model things.

35:49We do have the ability for material sciences. We have a whole slew of technologies that if we need it to go faster, and I think commercial industry when it's talking about a profit motive or a business motive needs to go fast and efficient as compared to the government, because let me ask you this, from my point of view, NASA is a government works project that keeps the DOD companies employed during peacetime. That's the way I think about it. And it's not about... Well, look, that's a more cynical view, which I'm not typically cynical, but on the second day. I get that. You definitely know a cynical guy.

36:31So, in fact, if you went cynic there, that says something, and I'm not even going to argue that. What I will say, however, is NASA, with all the pyramid of the below it that has to be all the moving parts that run 10 NASA centers and all the rest of the machinery that NASA is, it continues to be the singular agency that is at the frontier of space exploration. And it's not clear that that will be replaced by commercial space exploration, because the act of exploration almost inherently means there's not a profit, there's not an ROI expected for it. And as long as they're not an ROI, the motivation then falls on the shoulders of geopolitics rather than on private enterprise.

37:35What happens is private enterprise comes later, and then they do it more cheaply. But they're not going to be the first to invent. By the way, they can be the first to invest in something if it's not that much money. But if you're talking the level of money that space involves, I do not see private enterprise leading anything. So it depends, it depends what the rules are, right? Because everything we hold to value on earth, metals, minerals, energy, real estate is in near -infine quantities in space. But if you can't own it and can't create a market for it, then private enterprise isn't going to be able to invest in capitalized on it.

38:11So I'm not saying private enterprise has no place in space. I mean, I just won't do it first. That's all. Okay. Fair enough. I'll see evidence of that. I'm not wishing this were the case. I'm simply declaring that my observation of the delusions of space enthusiasts of the past 65 years tells me that the disconnect comes about because people say we can do it therefore we will. No, just because you can do something doesn't mean all the forces are aligned for it to happen at all. At all. And before we went to the moon people thought it was impossible. Now no one is thinking landing on another planet is impossible.

38:52So what's in our way is not the technology, it's the actual motivation that would fund who would do it first. That's all I'm talking about. I understand the incentive business very, very well. Sometimes you have to incentivize. As you've brilliantly done with the X prizes and all the other prizes you've conceived and put into motion, I mean, it's how we how we met. Yes, 35 years ago, 40 years ago. My gosh. It was 30 it was 30 years ago And just to tell that story I had just come up with the idea of the ex -price the first one for space flight Like before you knocked on my door and and yes literally And I read in the back of the science fiction penguin books that there were these tearout sheets that you could sign up for a trip to Venus Mars Jupiter Saturn and maybe even Pluto because it was a planet back then and you would submit your name and address an information in this form for a raffle and submit it to the Hayden Planetarium.

39:59And so I was recently appointed as chair. Yes. So I'm brand new in that office. Yes. And I'm thinking to myself, okay, everybody who submitted their name would be a perfect individual for me to go and hit up to help fund my ex -price for spaceflight. But I was from the 1950s. That wasn't exactly as clear to me at that point when I knocked on your door. And I'm like, hey, Dr. Tyson, do you happen to have a database of all the people who signed up for this? Because as a team of archives of everyone trying to, yeah, turns out we were able to recover a small box of that. It was just, you pulled out a shoe box.

40:42Well, you know the shoe box. Yeah, you know. I didn't know anything about it, right? This is your, so that was a clever sort of ploy, but you know, that's back when addresses didn't even have zip codes. And those are the names of it's all live. Now you've I was. Everybody want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me. And could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Companies called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body.

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42:49If you go to FountainLife .com Backslash Peter will put you to the top of the list. It really is something that is for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends, it's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy life spans. Go to fountainlife .com, backslash, Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. Here is a next story that surfaced this week. So large amounts of water appeared to be subsurface on Mars. Are you tracking the story? No, I'm not, but we expect that.

43:31We, Mars clearly, if you look at its surface today, there's no end of visual evidence of there once having been running water. There are meandering river bins, river deltas, floodplains, all the telltale signs of erosion caused by slowly flowing water and rapidly flowing water. And Mars' bone dried today. Have to ask, where did the water go? And the bedding person's suggestion was that it was sunken into the Bnitha surface as a permafrost. And you just have to go down there and melt it where there could be some pockets if there's any energy source at all That would maintain water and liquid form and if that's the case that would be a very high target and for the search for life Because it's ever more on earth where we find liquid water we find life including the Dead Sea Dead Sea because whoever named it didn't have a microscope I'm gonna I'm gonna put on your your betting man's hat so So, probability that there is life of any type on Mars today.

44:44Where do you put that? Today, that's a little harder. Whether there was once life, sure, life got started on Earth pretty quickly within about 100 billion years of the earliest moment it possibly could have formed. And that's not very, do I say 100 billion? Sorry, 100 million years. that's a very short interval of time compared to that. About half a billion years after the Earth was formed, right? So, four and a half billion years ago. So, four billion years ago. You know, in the early textbooks, they dated the earliest fossil evidence of life from the formation scenario of the Earth. That would have given you 600 million years or so.

45:26That's not fair to life, because Earth was hot. Earth was hotter than what could sustain complex molecules. So give it a chance, please. Okay. So Earth cools down. Then you have a period of heavy bombardment heated up again that's left over from the formation of the solar system. That has to cool down. Now you can start making complex molecules. You have an answer to my question. Oh, what? What's the probability today if you had to put, you know, as a betting man that light I think this subsurface, parmaprost, maybe 50 -50 microbial life, definitely nothing more complex than that. Because you can't be highly complex life and navigating rocks inside the rocks, and we can't call it soil because it's not soil, but the reguleth of Mars, you have to be small enough to be able to make that your home, and that would be microbial life.

46:25So I would have maybe 50 -50 microbial life, but I don't think anything more complex than that. Now, the next question is we know that ejecta from asteroid impacts on the Martian surface reaches the Earth. And the lunar surface as well. And the lunar surface. What's even cool? I know we are going with this, but let me slip something in. Okay, sure. It goes both ways. It goes always, right? A lot of asteroids moving through space were ejected rocks from their home planet. that means there could be rocks from Earth that are meteorites on the moon. And if that's the case, we could find fossilized evidence of Earth life in meteorites on the moon.

47:14That's a whole other project that somebody needs to undertake. Well, I think when you make your trip there, you should go out fossilizing. I'll do it. I'll be there. Yeah. But the point, and you know what I'm going with this, is Mars cooled first being further from the Earth. Well, and also being smaller when you're smaller. And being smaller. You have a higher surface area to volume ratio. And whenever that happens, you will cool. So a small potato will cool faster than a big potato after you pull them out of the oven. I remember that. Mars is one -tenth hour of mass, something like that. and you know one, what is it?

47:49One third, one half, one two and a half our size. And so you, it would cool way faster than Earth's, but go on. So the question of course is, is Earth life actually Martian life? Did it form on Mars first and then did ejective from the Martian surface reach the Earth and begin a process here? Yeah, it's crazy as that idea sounds, it's completely plausible. Yeah, because if Mars formed early, cooled earlier, formed light and it had water, formed life earlier than Earth formed life, and we're still living in an active early period of Earth solar system where impacts were more common than they are today.

48:34It is completely rational to suspect that we're even logical to suspect that a rock on Mars where microbial life living in the nooks and crannies of that rock moves through space have to having been ejected and finds Earth's gravity lands on Earth spawning life on Earth. Now, very important here. Many people misunderstand evolution. Let me just make it clear. There is no evolution, no animal adapts to anything. It either survives the change or dies. It does not adapt. What happens is at any given generation of a species, there is variation typically in what is born and that variation is random and if there is an assault on the environment that favors one of those variations, then that variation will walk through that portal into that new environment and all the rest die.

49:44None of them adapted to anything. The napkin sounds like it's an active thing that you are doing on purpose. There's not how any of this works. I say this because the rock going through space where there is no water, there is high radiation, there's high temperature coming out and landing and it's cold temperature and that all of these are forces operating on all the microbes. Most microbes will die. If any microbe happened to have resistance, to radiation, to pressure, to temperature, it will survive. Yes. And on earth, you look around. Is there anybody who has this kind of resistance on earth and you can help but look at the top of that list and you get the tardigrade water bear?

50:32It's microscopic. You can't kill this thing. Okay? You can radiate it. You can freeze dry it. You withhold water from it. It curls up and waits around. Like, however long it takes for water to show up again and pops back to life. We said that. We're going to help this creature get these abilities because it certainly wasn't on earth. Because these forces operating for its survival would have been the properties of space. Now, we don't think it came from space, but that's an example of how you would go through the reasoning about whether something on Earth came from Mars, because it has to get through space first.

51:12And of course, on Earth, we see all these extremophiles in the hydrothermal events in deep in the ocean at the point of volcanic eruptions. We see things in the coldest places on Earth. Well, that's a reminder that unlike how you and I learned biology in our textbooks, You don't need the 72 degree tide pool, you know, where everything's just right. Life can thrive in far greater range of environments than we were ever taught in the early days of learning about life on Earth. And if that's the case, of course, that opens up the options for places in the universe that previously we might have thought to be hostile to life, where you can find microbes just doing the backstroke because they love the extreme environments.

52:00And like you said, we have a whole term for them they call the extreme of files. But here's the point, if we go to Mars, the two scenarios, when we go to Mars. When we go to Mars. Mr. Optimistic, man. Do you think there's, okay, listen, you know, we could end as a species, that's true. But at some point, if we go to Mars, it's because the military forces of the world required it of us. You and I will continue to differ on that point. When I have the evidence of history on my side, you have wishful thinking on your side. That's the difference here. We have individual explorers who have charted paths.

52:45Yeah, but going to Mars is not an individual explorer. That's a trillion dollars. right there. $1 ,000 ,000. A trillion dollars. Hundreds of billions of dollars. So let me not buy the money and get making that happen. So this next topic here, I'll tell you, I'll remember when I was with Elon on a particular day, he was extremely glum. And I'm like, why are you so glum? And he goes, just figured out that Falcon 9 cannot get us to Mars. And he said, I have to stop and I need to build something bigger. And Starship was designed not for the lunar program. It was designed for going to Mars and retrofitted for the Moon Mars initiative.

53:29But how do you fund this thing? And Starlink is his venture to fund this thing. How do you get a trillion dollars in value? you plug into a large consumer -based engine, economic engine, which is communications. And I think he's doing pretty damn good. I'm not sure, I actually switched to T -Mobile on this node. So, he's got... He's got a lot of you. I know, I know. Well, you know, the idea of communicating over Starlink is pretty cool. But, okay, so I was recently on a ship. A circumnavigating Iceland. and we crossed the Arctic Circle, where there are no cell phone towers, and all of our internet there was via Starlink.

54:16And there was the first time I was on Starlink. Bad with this, it's very modest, like one megabit per second, but enough to do email and not to stream 4K video, but it definitely enabled communication. So of course Starlink's greatest value is where you don't otherwise have typical cell phone communications. So we can ask the very simple question, how many people will be served by star -linked at very high latitudes. That number is vanishingly small compared to everybody else who's served by cell phone towers. I'll tell you I use it on my airplane when I fly things because the cell phone towers are there just not in communication.

55:00So how many people are? Sorry, and high elevation. Yes, fun.

55:09So again, can I just back up for a minute? You mentioned President Kennedy's speech. So you may remember Kennedy gave two speeches. The first was to a joint session of Congress in May 1961, as you correctly remembered. Then he gave a speech the next year in 1962, too, a little more fleshed out with the idea of going to the moon. But that original speech, which we remember, you know, we'll, we'll put a man on the moon before the decade is out and return safely to earth, this sort of thing. You can even hear his Brookline Massachusetts accent saying it, right? That's how, that's how resonant those words are in so many of us.

55:50That's fine. And you realize, in Kennedy Space Center, Florida is a bust of Kennedy and in the granite next to the bus are those very words chiseled in there it is but mad on the moon before the decade they say we had leaders back then with visionaries and then excuse me excuse me go back a few paragraphs in that speech oh nobody does that why don't they let's find out what else he said that day what did he say that day through a joint session of congress before he said, let's go to the moon. He says, if the events of recent weeks could not utter the man's name, Yuri Gagarin, who would just come out of orbit, could not utter his name.

56:33If the events of recent weeks 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. That was the battle cry against communism, and that's actually what wrote the checks. Not the stirring rhetoric about how wonderful it would be to explore the moon. It was, we were scared, witness, that the godless communists would get the new high ground. So let's be honest with ourselves, and when people don't recall that part of the speech, that's part of the delusional state that we occupy when we're trying to make predictions about the future.

57:15Yeah, we'll be on Mars if China says they want to set up base camp then we're going to Mars if China doesn't do that My read of history tells me we're never going to Mars So I hear you my friend I hear you and I think that you're right on so many levels but but I Still believe we have moved from the era where only governments and large corporations could do things at this scale to the point where entrepreneurs and individuals can do things. It used to be the kings and the queens and robber barons, the only person who could possibly change the world. And today individuals are. And that will always be my belief.

57:57No, individuals have to be clear. Individuals have always changed the world. So I don't wanna under -seller break. But there is a different, There's a different book. You have no run around with a trillion dollars and they just spend it all. They they change the world with their views with their with their spirit energy to convince people that something's what we should be doing. Well, you know, let's look at the railroads. Let's look at the oil industry. But they, you know, they were underwritten by the Rockefellers and such. Yes, there was economic engines there and there need to be economic engines.

58:34Oh, I just cavalry, excuse me, just the government was totally in that. You sound like New Gingrich, who was a very big railroad analogist. Where he said, if we'd given them that's as money to private enterprise, we would've been in the moon 10 times over, but no, no, there's complete economic value to land that you're going to take from the Indians. This was the entire movement and the environment and minerals and so so did not I understand the need for a Boogieman to use that term there is another one out there You know many years ago I flew Stephen Hawking to zero G. Do you remember that? I don't know you were part of that but I did know he was He's zero G.

59:24Yeah, it's my time. That was you know he That's he needed to do that. Yeah, it was it was my company zero gravity corporate We fly these parabolic flights and it's another overnight success after 11 years of hard work started at 93 Finally got it didn't cost you a trillion dollars It did a lot of money, but not a trillion dollars. It's going so in 2006 after the unsari ex -price was won it was won in 2004 But two years later I'm I find myself on the phone with with with Professor Hawking on his computer and with his his administrative assistant slash nurse and And he is asking me the question whether I can fly him on a suborbital flight into space.

1:00:06And I say, I'm sorry Professor Hawking, I can't do that, but I can fly you on a zero G flight. And I thought, you know, taking the world's expert in gravity and to zero gravity, what could be better? Long story there, different podcast episode that I recorded on zero G. When he is at the Kennedy Space Center, when we're getting ready to take off, he agrees to do a pre -flight press conference. And we had no idea how he would do on this flight, right? He's very frail, his lungs, his ribs, you know, how we had a whole emergency room medical center on the flight. And in the pre -flight press conference, he was asked the question.

1:00:45You don't want to have lunch. Peter D. Manda's kills. Well, yes, yes, that was bad PR for zero. Believe me, believe me. I had the FAA tongue me. I could not make, I was disallowed from doing the flight after I'd spent 11 years. And I said, why? And they said, your operating specifications require you to only fly able -bodied people. And I had the presence of mine to ask, well, who determines whether they're able -bodied? And the FAA person said, well, I guess a flight doc or his physicians, I said, great. I bought malpractice for those individuals, got them to write letters to the FAA that he was able -bodied to fly into zero G.

1:01:24And they basically said it's your ass. Good luck. That's right. But they got their paperwork. So they're asked to cover about the paperwork. Exactly. So long story short, we're at the pre -flight press conference and he's asked why are you doing this? And he goes, given all the paraphrasing and all the risks humanity has from nuclear war And I, pandemics, he didn't include AI there. He said, I don't think the human race has a future unless we expand our presence out into space. And so the problem is that's not a clear and present danger on the top of people's minds like Russia, Soviet Union, or China.

1:02:13But it is an important element, right? This is what Elon keeps on going. we have to spread the the light of consciousness beyond the planet. Yeah, I would. So I don't know if you want to talk about that now, but I'm happy to. I would ask please, why do you want to do that? In case the earth should be or humanity should be wiped out by some existential threat such as give me your top three. Oh, asteroid approaching us from the sun And before we had a chance to see it, nuclear armageddon, a well engineered killer virus pandemic. Okay. So, so those, everything you just said makes complete sense and makes perfectly readable headlines with all your eggs in one basket.

1:03:05Everyone understands that principle. Okay. I have a more practical view of all of this. Please tell me. which is it seems to me that whatever it takes to terraform Mars and ship a billion people there, that seems to me to be more effort than finding all dangerous asteroids and deflecting them. Just to me, just to me, just to me, just to me, just to me, just to me, just to me, just to me, here. Okay? It needs to me that if we trash earth with climate change and and when or there's some killer virus, it seems to me that medical research to find a perfect antiviral serum given our access to the human genome and with AI assisted understanding proteins and whatever else, It seems to me that is a more realistic plan than shipping a billion people to Mars in case one planet gets taken out that way and so so the the reality of this For me is I would love to go to Mars, but not because If we go to Mars then half of all humans will die and we protect the remaining like what really?

1:04:33No, you want to save all humans no matter where we are and if you can do that to Mars every possible scenario we can think of today Is trivial to solve it seems to me compared with what you want to accomplish by shipping a billion people Let's begin. I'm not I'm not saying a billion and I'm not a Mars fan Okay, but I am I'm gonna have to tear or Mars if you want to like like Elon wants to do Yeah, well, or we need to back up some significant population off of planet. Now listen, I read maybe too many science fiction books and looking for and looking for and looking for rational to fund our space programs.

1:05:20But you know, we are thousands of years from now, millions of years from now, whatever we evolved to, we're going to look back at these next few decades as the moment in time that the human race moves irreversibly off the planet, right? We are the lungfish equivalent. And that's part of evolution is our... One first, if the first creature to move out the oceans onto land, yes. So I think that is in our, it's not a genotype, it is a phenotype of humans to desire to explore And you're mixing two highly separable variables there. One of them is we wanna go to Mars cause it's cool and we're gonna explore and we're gonna be the lung fish leaving Earth going.

1:06:06Cool, let's do it. But if you're motivated by saying, let's do that so that half the humans will die while the other half survives and we're not gonna save everybody, that's for me that, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying this is the consequence of what you're saying. This is insurance policies. This is insurance policy. That's what I utter. I utter the insurance policy for the species. I'm saying by the time we can do that on Mars, all of your dreams of mining asteroids will be true. They'll all be true. And if we can mine asteroids, it's like, hey, mining company 807, we've detected an asteroid headed our way.

1:06:42Go to them and mine them to zero. Okay. What the? They'll have the ability to do this. I, I, it sure, I sure hope so. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on biodefense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA? Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now, Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit and stool, and can tell you so much about your health.

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1:08:08Listen, I've been using biome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. best of all, Vyom is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to Vyom .com slash Peter. I've asked Naveen Jane, a friend of mine, who's the founder and CEO of Vyom to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at Vyom .com slash Peter. Let's turn to a much more scientific conversation here. We've seen hearings in Congress, a I'm curious. I mean, you must have been asked over and over again. What do you think of these?

1:08:49Seems like super credible individuals who are bringing forward what they believe as viable evidence for these unidentified flying objects. Not even called UFOs anymore. Are they? They're called some UACs. UAPs. Unidentified paranormal phenomena. phenomenon. Okay. Yeah, who are they kidding? They mean UFOs. Yeah. We're just trying to rebrand it. So to get rid of the giggle factor. Um, so yeah, the government calls them UAPs. So I noticed that the news nation is saying, forget the UAP. Let's go back to what everyone knows what these are. Um, so you want to know, I think they're interesting mysteries.

1:09:32I don't have any problem investigating mysteries. But if you want to think that the thing you don't know what you're looking at are visiting aliens from outer space. That's a leap. You can't go from, I don't know what I'm looking at, to, I definitely know what I'm looking at, I'm looking at aliens. That's, you can't do that because you're replacing certainty, you're replacing ignorance with certainty in the absence of anything to bridge that gap. So these are fun.

1:10:06I space telescope can produce high -resolution color images of gas clouds 7 ,000 light years away, yet the best evidence we have for aliens is monochromatic fuzzy tic -tac in restricted air space on Earth seen only by the US Navy. That's a little weird to me. And by the way, it's in our own atmosphere and that's the best image they can produce. That's a little weird to me. So, other thing, at any given moment, you surely know a million people are airborne, a million with a window. And there's six, at least, six billion smartphones in the world, each capable of high resolution photos and videos.

1:10:52If we were being invaded by aliens, we have the capacity to crowdsource that phenomenon. Cat videos go viral overnight. If you get any picture of an alien or there's spaceship that went with the detail you'd expect from high -resolution photography, oh my gosh! The world will know about it overnight. Overnight, but that's not what's happening here. So all of a sudden we're thinking that the Pentagon has special access to aliens. Really? Really? We have people everywhere on Earth, even places where the Pentagon isn't. And no, we don't see, so we have fuzzy images. Fine, keep looking for them. I don't wanna stop people's enthusiasm for this.

1:11:40I don't know what that is, go figure it out. But I'm just thinking if we were being invaded by aliens, we would not require congressional hearings to establish that fact. I love it. By the way, one of the testifiers, Vec. Last Summer, said he had non -human biologics in a lock box in the back. And I take people at their word, what would a non -human biologics be? Well, take the tree of life with everything on it, all the plants, animals, fungus, insects, everything, and remove the branch that are humans. And everything else would be non -human biologics. So he could have tree bark in his lock box for all I know based on that kind of testimony.

1:12:36You know, I wanna switch us over to another subject that is making the headlines heavily and it's AI. How do you feel about AI safety? What are your thoughts? Are you concerned about the speed at which AI is progression? I'm not uniquely concerned about AI relative to any other highly powerful bit of technology science engineering that we have brought upon ourselves in the history of civilization. So no, not uniquely worried. I think there should be constraints. Yes. There should be. But the constraints need to be established by people who know what they're constraining. It can't just be some members of Congress who read a few headlines and now they want to pass legislation based on a fear factor It has to be intelligently reasoned debated of course And by the way you need politicians in that debate because politicians are our collective representatives And so they carry some of the fears of the joys of the citizenry So but you would have this conversation to find out what would be taking AI too far and let's put constraints, make that illegal to take it too far.

1:13:53What would be just right? And then you have examples of what would be just right. So this week, California legislature approves a bill with sweeping AI restrictions. I find, you know, listen, safety standards requiring large -scale AI companies to undergo safety testing before deployment. Fantastic, in fact, open AI and the topic have volunteered to do this, transparency great. But this is interesting. Worker protections, protecting workers and call centers from being replaced by AI. That would be right for Republicans to argue against. That's like a, that's like raw meat for a Republican. That I think is naive.

1:14:35That would be like passing a law saying, we have to protect all auto workers from these bots that are now assembling our cars. that had you done that, then we would have trailed the world in an entire industry and the industry would have gone out of business. So that looks a little naive to me.

1:14:57And so, oh, by the way, you and I are old enough to remember that when cars were made by humans, there was a very real chance that in the morning your car wouldn't start. Okay, I was showing a movie to my son from the movie was from like the 70s and the bad guys are running to get away And they get in the car and they try to start the car and it doesn't turn over and my son said Didn't they have gas in the car? It's not Think that Why would a car not start? Of course it's gonna start. It's a machine that works perfectly, right? So So cars are lighter, faster, better, more fuel efficient than they've ever been, and they're all made by robots.

1:15:44So we have to, one has to think about, if you want to be proactive about it, what you should say is, what new job opportunities will AI bring to us, rather than complain about what jobs it replaces, just to keep that in mind. And by the way, Hollywood went through this brilliantly, or the strikes that happened was it a year ago, just coming out of COVID, what part of those arguments, and I'm a member of SAG After, this green actor's guild, American Federation of Radio and Television artists. That's the two unions had joined together, because I had some cameos. Nothing on a big time actor, of course, I'm not.

1:16:24I don't know how to act, but I can be myself as a cameo in a tiny role as I have been in a few movies. But one of their concerns was because they don't want a movie studio that has access to your video record to now recreate your character and your voice for a role that you don't even have to show up for. And even more so than that is the concern. Let's say I have 20 seasons of law and order, right? And I have staff writers that wrote them all. I get an AI bot to ingest all 20 seasons and I say, write me 20 more seasons. On this topic, that topic, that topic, in the style that these previous 20 had been written.

1:17:07Well, that's clearly intellectual property theft at that level. And so this all had to be hammered out and it was. So let me ask you because this is interesting, right? The disruption of the hegemony of Hollywood is coming because we're not far, if we're not there already from the studio saying, I'm going to create my own stars and starlets. And we're going to own them. And they're going to be fully digital. And we're going to make our movies based on them. We're going to create some of our tunes. That's what cartoons are. But when they become lifelike or we're going to bring back Marilyn Monroe.

1:17:47They can animate a cartoon. They're animated movies. Disney created the Lion King. So what's your point? Somebody gets money for the voice. Okay, of course that was James Earl Jones. Okay, as Muflassa. But the character, Disney owns the characters. So what's different to you about this? Only that they are photo -realistic human characters that would obviate the need for actors at some point in the future. Okay, so I wonder if, that's an interesting future. I wonder if they would ever become as popular as real human being actors With the press you know where TMZ follows them when they come out of the restaurant or You know if you're not an actual living thing is that lifestyles are the rich and famous that will that Will anyone have any interest at all?

1:18:40I bet not So let's take a look at this. This is out of you got no end of slides here I Well, this is fascinating for me, so let's check this out here. So the ability of AI to create effectively total disinformation. Right? So do you imagine we're going to head towards a future of defaulting to disbelief? Yes, yes. In fact, I foresee, so my big prediction here, I predict that we are within five years, in real life, possibly three of an internet where the deep fakes are so good that even people who believed that fake news was real will no longer believe the fake news. Okay, think about it. We're defaulting to disbelief.

1:19:42So the people who believed the fakes will no longer believe the fakes because they'll think the fakes are faked. Those who thought the fakes were real will no longer believe that the fakes are real because they'll think the fakes are fakes. The day that happens will represent an implosion of information integrity of the entire internet. And that will be its tombstone, the Internet, you know, 1994 to 2028, rest in peace. And all that will remain are cat videos. And other meaning postings, which is how we all were baptized into the Internet 30 years ago. It will no longer be a source of objective truth, of objective information.

1:20:35And we'll resort to books, oh my gosh, or actual one -on -one interviews, things like that. So that is the future. And it'll be its own fault, right? Or with the rules and regulations, it'll be a crime to have a deep fake that is not otherwise watermarked as much. Counter -painting. Counter -painting rules. You've found out and you are sent to prison. So you can't stop people from doing the various things, but you can have a penalty for them if they do. And maybe that will help rein some of this in. Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called one skin.

1:21:22It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a synolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. Have you been tracking the humanoid robot wars? I'm not into humanoid robots. I think it's a waste of time. Really? I won't tell other people it's a waste of time, but personally, I don't go on the airwaves or on the internet posting my opinions, because I don't care whether anybody shares my opinion at all.

1:22:05Well, I care whether you're what your opinion is here. So why do you think that's a waste of time? I feel the love. Thank you, thank you Peter. This to build a humanoid implies that there's something useful about a humanoid. When, in practically anything we need a human to do, we can make a machine that does it better and the machine doesn't look human. Right on down to the running blades of sprinters who don't have feet. Okay? I remembered in elementary school, my teacher saying, oh, the human body is so well designed and the feet are all the, every bone in the right place and tendon and ligament and, and it's perfect for walking and running and keeping our balance.

1:22:55The people don't have feet, they give them blades, they can run faster than they would have without feet. So the idea that the human form is something to emulate, I find to be shortsighted. Because if you want to get tasks done to have a human do the task, no, no, remember the Jetsons, okay, the Jetsons, remember, by the way, 2022 that year, all evidence shows that that's the year George Jetson was born sharing that with you. And that was the year of soy lake green took place. Interesting. But in the Jetsons, he had a car that he flew. At the time, no one would imagine a self -driving car. They would imagine a humanoid robot who would drive the car for you.

1:23:44Just take out the middle man, take out the middle bot. And the car is the robot. And you know something, it's in the shape of a car, because that's what you needed to do. Well, no, this hunt to get a... I don't... I'm other than for, you know, to help autistic children relate to humans, if it's... If you can get out of that uncanny valley, sure. But for the utility of a robot to be in a human form, I don't see that taking on at all. Do you want to hear the argument for it? Please. So we are running a global $10510 trillion GDP. And right now, half that GDP is labor, and it's human labor. The projections that I showed you that image of the three top robot companies, Domestic or 1X and Optimus by Tesla and Figure 2 by Figure.

1:24:43They're price point. And longer in the running there. Japan. Japan, no, they're about 30 well funded humanoid robot companies. And there's many in China, right? China's got the problem that it based its entire economy on labor rates. And labor rates are going up. And people are no longer manufacturing in China. They're manufacturing domestically with 3D printers and local manufacturing improvements and so forth. Or so, and China's also got the issue of an aging population without, you know, it's the one child policy basically left half the grandparents without a kid to take care of. With the vitamin A.

1:25:20Yeah. Yeah. So, these robots, there's unitary out of China, which is a $16 ,000 robot. So the numbers right now are trending towards a $20 ,000 price tag for one of these robots. if you look at it on a price per kilogram, which I think is a reliably, it's called it $40 ,000 per robot. So you're able to rent or lease a robot for $100, $200 per month. I can think of a thousand things, like cleaning up my house, doing the laundry, mowing the lawn, just anything that I don't need to do If these robots are driven by multiple, multimodal AI, they're just helping around the projections right now, maybe off, but on the order of by 2040, somewhere between one to 10 billion, one to 10 billion humanoid robots on the planet.

1:26:24That means as many humanoid robots as humans. That's really true. That would mean more than Elon's predictions and God knows he's not always right, but he thinks more prevalent than cars on the planet. But having one of these sort of multi -modal, full utility capabilities that gives your AI arms and legs to do things, right? Like, please take care of everything in the house, go shopping, go get these things for me. The one thing that we humans all have in common is 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week. The wealthy differentiate from the poor by having other people to do things for them or the ability to save time by hopping on a private jet.

1:27:16So I think these are time savers and the ability to make yourself multipresent. Does that not have a appeal for you? So this would be to put a person, a robotic person in place of tasks that are not otherwise streamlined to happen without a person. So they would surely be a marketplace for that over some interval of time. But why not design a house, why not design laundry that cleans itself? Because building a humanoid robot that can do what a human do in a human environment that's driven by an AI at a human or above capability allows you to do everything without redesigning everything. Yeah, no, I get that.

1:28:05It's a universal interface. Designs change, right? So, so, I agree. But we're not going to not design everything forever. All right. So, I'm going to say, I don't want a robot. I'm going to find a way, I'm going to design my home so that I don't need the robot. Okay? I'm going to design my home so that I don't, I'm going to design my car so I don't need a robot to drive me to work. Oh, I have a self -driving car, right? This is my point. The self -driving car is the single best earliest example of the, of to me, why you will ultimately not need humanoid robots. Because you're going to build a thing that is itself the robot and it doesn't look anything like a human.

1:28:43Well, we call everything that be that works like this. We called the robot that cleans dishes dishwasher We give it we give it a name. Are you gonna get a robot to load the dishwasher? Are you that fucking lazy?

1:29:01Probably probably remember on the Jetsons the maid I forgot her name. Yeah, Rosie Rosie of course Rosie You know she she wore a little maids Yeah. You've got and your book coming out in a few weeks. Tell me about it. We give it a shout out. No, so it's it's oh my gosh. This is I almost well up when I comment on this. This is emotional. This is a little bit a little bit of my very first book. Yes. That I published back in the 1980s while I was in graduate school. You were 18th time. I have updated into the 21st century and at the time I wrote a column and it was called Merlin. Merlin and I created from Merlin.

1:29:50It's a different Merlin than your favorite Merlin, but it's similarly magical. This Merlin has lived for all of time and if you ask Merlin, there was a question in Enter Column. You'd ask Merlin, dear Merlin, I don't quite know how gravity works. And because Merlin has lived for all of time, Merlin just recounts a conversation with Isaac Newton, and you'll see the dialogue between the two of them as the reply to that question. And so this access through time and space has made for a much richer question and answer experience for the reader than I think would otherwise be possible. Well, it's called Merlin's Tour of the Universe, and my brother illustrated it.

1:30:32So he's an artist, and there's sort of playful, fun, the reverent illustrations throughout. Does he do this one as well? Yes, no, no, he did it, he did the original and so we update, yeah, a lot of science had to be updated, of course, because this was from 30 years, 35 years ago. But it was, I mean, I, well, up a little bit because re -inhabiting the character of Merlin in this book, bringing it up to date, It was it was so joyous to have done it the first time and to do it a second time was even more so and then I Reminded that Merlin is actually sort of terse where necessary and witty and a little bit irreverent and I really and the answers are mostly short and I realized That was my Proving ground for my postings on Twitter Okay, it was like I was I was being honed for that for the short form commentary on the world.

1:31:34You're just at your time. At the end of October. A Merlin's tour of the universe. Yeah, and I just checked in. You can pre -bite on Amazon. Reward her. Yeah, yeah, okay. Excellent. They got that. It only just would have just been listed there because we're just putting in the final touches. So who's it for, by the way? Who'd you write it for originally? And now? Oh, no, no, I mean, it was a question and answer column. So it tended to be a lot of retired people with like time on their hands to think of these curiosity. Yeah, and curiosity. You know, retire people who were life -long learners, but there's some very young people where the question was asked by the parent.

1:32:14Like one of them was apparently a four -year -old asked this via the mother. It was if rain can make rainbows, then can a moon make moonbows. something like that. Right. It's a cute little thing. And there's also sometimes Merlin is prone to rhyme. Alright, so if rhyming gives a better answer than otherwise, so I can I share one with you? Please, I'd love to. The first time I'm talking about this. I love it. In any platform, first time I'm talking about it. So you get it first here. Thank you. Someone asked, dear Merlin, are red stars, red because they're hotter than blue stars. Okay? That's perfectly rational question.

1:33:03And so rather than just say yes or no, so Merlin just fleshes it out a bit. So here it goes.

1:33:11Hang on. On canvas with paint in the artist's school, it is red that is hot and blue that is cool. But in science we show, as the heat gets higher, A star will glow red like the coals of a fire, but raise the heat some more and what is in sight? Behold the star has turned bright white, but the hottest of all Merlin says unto you is neither red nor white when a star has turned blue. That's beautiful The challenge there was making it astrophysically accurate So you're having your career, my friend. So blue hot is the hottest of all. Yes. As well. No, for example. And the stove that you turn on that turns red hot, we think of that as the limiting hot.

1:34:01But if you kept increasing the heat, it would turn white hot. It would melt. But if you kept heating it even in a melted state, it would start glowing blue hot. And that's what's going on in the stars. Anyhow, so this is just a fun romp. And I'm all the clamped. That's the Marlin Tour of the Universe on your favorite book purchasing. Do you read the book as well? Are you reading it for Audible? Are you getting it in the audience? Thank you. Yes, yes, yes. In fact, the company that's publishing the printed book cut their teeth as an audio book company. It's called Blackstone Publishers. And so, yes, I read all the answers, but we got voice actors to be the people asking the questions.

1:34:43That's great. It's a fun app. When Merlin has a conversation with Isaac Newton, we got to get a Brit in there with the Isaac Newton X. We got to do that. So the conversations are split up that way. One last topic before we jump, we're going to be seeing each other again in about a month's time. That's the only calendar I look forward to that. This is the 30th anniversary of the X Prize, which we spoke about when you and I met some 30 years ago. And you're going to be on stage live with me and it will be recording. But your audience knows I've not gotten an invitation until now. And you've been doing this for 29 years.

1:35:21I just want you to want him to know. I wanted to make it super special for you, my friend. And three years is an interesting interval of time. That's why I'm saying this. Oh, I'm making this. Yes, because it's the subject of one of your other books. And we're going to be talking 30 years ago and 30 years into the future. Yeah, thanks. Oh my gosh. Yes, 30 years. So in 2022, I published a book called Stary Messenger Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization and it has all the wisdom that I've gleaned as a scientist in this world is in that book And I could not have written it five years earlier ten years.

1:35:58I was not wise enough Gring pen to page for what's in that book one of the chapters is is, oh, by the way, so it's what civilization looks like if you are scientifically literate and if you have a dose of cosmic perspective and it's stuff in society and all these paired words that we argue about over Thanksgiving are the titles of chapters like color and race, law and order, gender and identity, life and death, truth and beauty. This, it goes on and on and on. and it's what those look like if you are a scientist. And you say, you know, you haven't evaluated all the evidence. So you think you're a guy, but because what does the scientist do?

1:36:40But load up all the evidence and let the evidence do the talking. But if you do the talking instead of the evidence, you're going to land in a place that does not match objective reality. So that's what the book is. One of the chapters is called Exploration and Discovery. And I spend half that chapter on this journey from 1870 to 2020 in 30 -year increments, highlighting the fact that the world at the end of each 30 -year increment is completely unrecognizable to the people at the beginning of that 30 -year increment. the way we live, the way we communicate, the what we do with our time, what we care about is completely different.

1:37:28And I suppose one could have done a 20 year interval or a 50 year interval, 30 seemed about right. And so the fact that we're on a 30 year cusp here, that's interesting. So 30 years ago we're talking 1994, I suppose, right? Yes, exactly. So a big point that I make is that almost every prediction made at the beginning of a 30 -year period just It comes out wrong. It just yet it wrong Because the advances going exponentially come from places no one is thinking they come from I'll give an example and I give this in the book in the year 1930 years after 1870 that's when everyone talks about the year 2000, right?

1:38:12Because it's a hundred years hence. All right. So they draw pictures of what they imagine the future to be like. Here's one of them. You ready? There's a steamship coming onto shore, because steamships in 1900 was the way to go crossing the Atlantic. The steamship comes onto the shore and railroad wheels pop into place and it goes straight onto a railroad to continue the cargo transportation. This was the future. You go straight from ships to rail. Oh my gosh, what else would it do? Oh, it had sidewalks that were on different levels and the sidewalks were on rollers. So it's just so quick. And everyone had personal balloons that was strapped under your arm, armpit.

1:39:06So you can float around and get places Because worms and the ridgables were all the rage. Okay? Sorry, that is what they predicted for the year 2000. When three years later we'd have the airplane. Yes. Okay? You can't give away a blimp today. Alright? So I do a deep dive into what people are doing at the beginning and at the end of these intervals. And it's fricking mind blowing. What is going on in the last 150 years? So when people say what's life gonna be like in 50 years or 30 in the year 2050? I'm saying give up don't even try Go home One last thing I quote a guy from the Brooklyn daily eagle in the year 1900 He he works for the New York Central Railroad so he's in the world of transportation and And by the way, what's going on in the 1900?

1:40:02The internal combustion engine car was just invented. The modern bicycle took final form. The country is crisscrossed with railroad, steamships, dirigables. He says, we can scarcely imagine that progress in transportation in the 20th century will be as great as the progress we've made in the 19th century. That's got to be the most bone -headed prediction ever made ever. So, now maybe you're not one of these guys making these bone -headed predictions because that was a reverse prediction. That was, it'll never be as advanced as we have it now. And you're trying to go the other way with your ex -price and maybe you land somewhere in the middle.

1:40:48But I'm betting in 1994, there are things happening today you had no idea would be going on in this world. For sure. For sure. And as you said earlier, a lot of it has been in the digital information versus the first. Your future man. If there's a future man walking this earth, it's you. Okay. Because you're running behind your future investments. So that's, you're not just writing a book, you know, of predictions and sitting back and waiting for people to say what comes true or not, you've got skin in the game. And so I applaud you for that. Thank you, buddy. Where do people find you? Obviously, start talk if you have not yet listened to start talk.

1:41:28Oh, my podcast, yes, start talk. Please. Yeah, we, it's, it's, it's. How long has it been going on? It's been, oh, yeah, since 2009. Nice. Nice. You heard of the earliest podcasts out there. It's one of the earliest. In fact, we were terrestrial radio before we were, before podcasts were a thing. We also have a stint on television before Disney bought National Geographic. We are on National Geographic Television and so there are episodes that are there but we've been going strong ever since and it's bringing the universe down to earth. In a fun way I have a co -host who's a comedian who's the source of levity in the conversation and my guest to a force of gravity and I carry the control knob so there's the right mixture for everybody at all times.

1:42:14And I see you on X occasionally. I'm totally, I've been posting to X less often. Yeah. What's been, you know, the algorithms have changed. I have a huge following on X. It's like, it's like nearly 15 million people. But with algorithms now, it's just, what is the virality of what you post more than your following that's gonna then view it? And we've had some highly viral postings from my podcast because we're now clipping the podcast and posting them on TikTok and Instagram. So X has become less of an object of affection for me in recent months and years than it had been. Well, buddy, I am grateful for you in this universe and on this planet.

1:43:02Thank you. But just to be clear, so I'm Neil Grass Tyson on all platforms except for X, where there's too many letters to use up in your character allocation. So I'm Neil Tyson on Twitter and on X. But Neil the grads Tyson everywhere else. And the podcast is start talk. So thanks for those shout outs. Of course, buddy. I look forward to seeing you on the stage at X Prize Visioneering towards the end of October. And thank you for joining me, my friend. Great to see you.