Neil deGrasse Tyson on Understanding Our Current Reality (XPRIZE Visioneering) | EP #140

28:48Not. Okay. So, so this became a highly illuminating exercise. So going from 1870 to 1900 shall we? Okay, so I remember I took notes. Oh you took notes yeah what did I say in 1870? Well let's see we got the steam ships. Yes steam ships. We got the golden spike. The golden spike? Yeah. So the real one was first late. The team said yes. Oh my gosh we can cross the country as a new thing to celebrate. We had the Orient Express. Orient Express across Europe. Right. 1880 bends and the engine. Yes the internal. So between 1870 and 1900, the internal combustion engine, and the bicycle. The bicycle, the modern bicycle, as we know it, was perfected.

29:36It's got somebody's name associated with it, which we've long forgotten. So that's another means of transportation that did not exist in 1870. And it's odd though, when you think about it. No ancient painting of anybody, is it riding a bicycle? But that's just kind of weird, right? Fundamental discovery that persisted ever since and has been extraordinary. One of the things you point out that I think is so important to say here is that every age we think now is the most incredible time ever. Yes. Like now is like the... One of the great delusions of it all. Yes. You say, all the great discoveries happen, wow, I'm here and wow.

30:14No, no, no. So, if you plot an exponential... All right, if you plot an exponential, so time is on the x -axis. Are we on the log scale or on the linear scale? Linear scale. Linear scale to see this effect. All right. Okay, so just checking. Good thing to check. Yeah. So the x -axis is time. The y -axis is whatever is the thing you're measuring that's changing exponentially. It doesn't matter what. If you plot it, it will look like it's mostly horizontal. And just in the last time frame, it goes up like this. And you're at the top of that because you're in modern day. You say look at all the new advances that just happened.

30:53What a privilege it is to be alive today. We must be special. We must be special. So now what? This is a, that's the big problem of humans thinking we're always special. So now, if you truncate it anywhere, I don't care where, truncate it to like here where you said that's pretty flat. Now, re -plot it. It'll look exactly the same. Because the exponential of today tapped everything else down relative to it. You cut it off midway, that's the exponential. You think is your special day? Except where you were is now back down here. Right? So, like, 10 years ago, you thought you were at the top, and now 10 years later, that top is now back down here and you're at the top again.

31:41Correct. Because it keeps ascending. Yes. Yes. And so, this is another, it's a delusion that we live in. I mean, I keep on thinking like now with Starship and with AI and with humanoid robots. You're thinking you're living in special time. It's like, my God, we must be in a simulation. Otherwise, why would be alive right now? So, that urge is strong. It is. And I recognize it and I'm victim. I fall victim to it every now and then. But then, but not right now. I look back. I have a lot of books that go back several centuries. Because that's what I do. One of them is a book in 1898 written by a professor of astronomy and he's reporting on discoveries made about the Sun.

32:26And this is the second edition of his book on the Sun. When was the first edition? 1895. In the last three years, we've learned so much about the Sun, I have to put out a new edition. He has no idea what he doesn't yet know. We don't know that there's thermonuclear fusion in the core. He doesn't know how the sun is making energy as far as he knows there's a lump of coal cooling off over the past 10 ,000 years. So they were idiots, but they didn't know it, but they're celebrating what they knew. So reading passages such as that keep you humble in the present moment and that's important because this everyone like the guy from 1900 saying we would never rival those other Advances what other points you make is we all think we're super special living right now But none of us say oh my god.

33:20We're such we're so backwards and so in name compared to what we're going to be No one says that no one says that would be a completely legitimate sentence to another correct and and what x -prices doing is of course making that happen. So you're making it more real. We're trying to accelerate the future into the present day. So if you get everyone to think to themselves, gosh, we're such idiots compared to what will be in 100 years, that might be another engine of progress. Because nobody wants to be an idiot. Yeah. So let's move on. I've got one. I've got a couple of 1930. Oh my gosh. 1900 to 1930, we have the invention of the airplane.

33:57We have a total world war. We have a pandemic. We have kills more people than did the war. We have, up to 1930, okay. The Adam? The structure of the Adam? Yes, we finally learned the Adam. Quantum physics is discovered. We are on the centennial decade of the discovery of quantum physics in the 1920s. And there is no creation storage or retrieval of information, digital information, without an exploitation of the quantum. them, and what another heels of a quantum advance, with quantum computing. But computing itself can only exist as we know it because of the foundations that were laid in that decade.

34:39By the way, we did that without even knowing that the neutron exists. The neutron was discovered in 1930. Look at how much we even got to figure out about the atom in the absence of the neutron. The radio comes online. Yes. Yes, the radio comes online. We have the early cinema. It's silent. Black and white and white. But it's, oh my gosh, a moving image. There's stories where people, one of the early movies was at the Great Train robbery. There's one of the great early movies. And they have a scene with the train coming towards the camera. And people were in a cinema and they were like, ha ha ha ha ha.

35:15Anything, if you've never seen that, how would you react? I saw some, was it an episode of Beverly Hillbillies or something where he sees a TV. Who's that man in that box? The internet has gone and shoots it. Okay? That's what we do in America if you're from overseas here. So, you shoot, then you ask questions. We saw the diminishment of horse manure in favor of... Oh, I guess? Yeah, oh, oh, oh, oh! So, sorry. Sorry, there are two photos. One from 1905, Fifth Avenue, New York, Easter Sunday. Okay? There's nothing but horse -drawn carriages. Nothing, okay? And they're horse taxis, it's horses. They are the currency of urban transportation and a farming, okay?

36:12Ten years later, 1915, that same photo was taken. There are nine, no more than a 30 automobiles for every one horse -drawn carriage. We went from a civilization that literally and figuratively was built on the backs of horses and within 10 years you couldn't give away a horse. You couldn't give away a horse because everyone was using a car. Now, listen to vision ears. What's the vision ears? Vision ears, okay? Listen, it's 1900. There's the fear of the great manure catastrophe. Yes. Which is an article written in the series. Tongue and cheek piles. But it was in Manhattan, which is not a large place, and you access it by bridges and tunnels to New Zealand.

37:13There were horses, and horses do what they do. You feed them, they poop. The poop goes into the street. The horse that you don't take into the horse bathroom, it's in the street. And the people whose whole job it was to clean up the manure. Now what do you do with it? You bring it to another place, and it makes a pile. Then somebody else comes in with multiple horse -drawn carriages to haul the manure out of the island, okay? But those horses that are hauling the manure, they're pooping. Okay, so if you run the arithmetic on this, people imagine the manure catastrophe. And manure was at it attracted flies.

37:54You have no indoor supermarkets back then, at least in the inner cities, most of food was sold by street carts. You fish, you're fruit, you're all of this with street carts. So the flies were everywhere. And it's smell. You read the descriptions and the horse urine and horse poop just permeated the conversation. Yes, yeah It was just in the air and so there was a lot of Visionary discussion about what to do about the horse poop or the fly so they said let's put something in the feed So that when it comes out its poop the flies will not be attracted to it because that was one of the health issues How do you get rid of the flies if you're not gonna get rid of the poop then another one was what can we feed the horse to reduce the amount of poop that comes out the other side.

38:43This, by the way, is a question NASA has addressed over the Apollo era with their astronauts. Because they're sitting there in the capsule, and they got to eat, but you don't want them to poop. So you want to reduce the poop? Why not? Only feed you things your body's going to use and have no waste at all. So these are thoughts... So I'm imagining, linear thinking vision ears, back then would have been trying to solve the manure problem in that way. I'm gonna say. The actual solution was the car. Yes. That was the solution. Yes. Okay, so that's a lesson to us all. And that happened within 10 years.

39:23So somebody in 1900 coming back in 1930 they would not recognize the landscape. They said, where's the horse? Oh, it's a horse -steroing carriage without a horse. How do you do that? Oh, it has an engine. What's an engine? Oh, it's a user on fuel. What fuel? Oh, it's gasoline. Where do you get it from under the graph? It's a The heads would explode That's just that's just 191330. Well, and we let's not forget the fact Lindbergh crosses the Atlantic. We electrify our cities. Oh, cities are electrified Oh, I got another quote for you. I got a quote 1908, the quote, man will never fly from New York to Paris.

40:071908, you know what I said that? Orville Wright!

40:14Orville Frickin Wright said that. He, he had his brother in the airplane, but he cannot think exponentially, because to get to Paris is an exponential thought From flying a few yards and kitty hawk. Do you think we go with meters, by the way? Oh, yeah, to America, Jay. Everybody, I 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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42:30If you go to FountainLife .com -peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's 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 I don't know if you know this that From 1930 to 1960 We introduced the first commercial jet plane The Boeing 707. 707. And that was done in 1956. 58. OK. Do you know?

43:19By the way, that's within the next 30 -year period, 1930 to 1960. Watch. Do you realize that the wingspan of the Boeing 707 is greater than the distance flown by the Wright brothers on their first flight? That's awesome. That's brick in. Oh, just give it up for the right brother. Yeah, okay And their and their sister and their sister tell me about their sister We'll find out there's a great documentary coming out that she actually did most of the work

44:00As these things go as these things go So, was she the one who took the picture of them? No, no, no. Somebody's got to take the picture. I want you to hit, wait. You left out that, oh, also, we have an orbiting satellite. Yes, okay. What day, what day, what year was the butnic? October 4th of 1957, yes. 1957, and before that, not, what 10 years before, we break the sound barrier. Yes. Now, if you said to the Wright Brothers, Hey, one day this will go fast enough. It'll be greater than the speed of sound. They'll laugh you out of Ohio. So it's still, okay. So they get in those 30 years. We get atomic power.

44:45Oh, sorry. Oh, there's a world war. We create the atom. And by the way, we discover plutonium, named after the object formerly known as a planet. And we don't get me started on that. We're gonna follow back. Pluto. No! Hold on. Hold on. By the way, I'm... What do you stand on that, by the way, yes or no? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. Peter, would you stand on whether Earth is round? Yes. It's not a stance. It's just the truth. No, it's a definition. We don't have a definition. We don't have a coming.

45:26Earth, Earth, our moon to our moon, my butt. Our moon to our planet should say. Who hears a Pluto file here? Raise your hand. OK. Our moon has five times the mass of Pluto. I bet they never told you that, didn't they? No. OK. You know, more than half of Pluto's volume is ice. So that if we're brought to where Earth is right now, heat from the sun would evaporate that ice in it would have a tail. And it has no kind of behavior for a planet.

46:01Don't get me started. So now, I think we're in 1960. But before then, I love the periodic table and I just got to say this about it. Okay. When Herschel discovered the planet Uranus, and it's finally named Uranus, properly pronounced, yeah, if you're older than eight, you should say Uranus, okay? You get a hall pass if you're younger than eight to call it Uranus if you want. All right, so this is the planet Uranus is discovered within a few years, a brand new element is discovered, turns out to be unstable, we would use the term radioactive later on, but they named that after the new planet that was discovered, that was the element uranium.

46:54Element 90. What about the one on us, the sky? No watch. Some years after that, 100 years after that, we discover another planet and we name it Neptune. The next element in the periodic table heavier than uranium, now number 93, was not yet named and not yet discovered until just after that planet. So they named that after the next planet and that would be Neptuneium and there's element 94 not yet discovered waiting its turn. The object formerly known as a planet called Pluto was discovered in 1930, okay? Shortly after that we discover element 94 It's named after the ninth planet plutonium. So the periodic table preserves your uranium Neptuneium and plutonium in sequence nice with Pluto getting a Atonement named on false pretence, okay, so now But here's the point We discover plutonium in 1930 it is weaponized turned into a bomb and deployed 15 years later That is the pace of what's going on at the time.

48:10The two bombs was a uranium bomb and a plutonium bomb. We knew uranium would work. We were not sure about plutonium. It was a new boy on the block. And so that's what was tested at a famously now portrayed in the film Oppenheimer. They tested the plutonium bomb, not the uranium bomb. And that's the one that then was dropped on Nagasaki. point is between 1930 and 1960 we cracked the atom, weaponized the atom, break the sound barrier, go into space. Oh my gosh! Is there anything about 1960 that would be recognizable to anyone from 1930? I think not. Let's keep going. So 1960 to 1990. I'm a lot. A lot.

48:57Computers go from specialized room size equipment that served the military and scientists to things you have on your desk, stand -alone computers. This is something they got wrong in the movie 2001. Oldtimer here, when was the movie released? 1968, oh 1968, he's good, he's good. 1968, the vision of life in the year 2001. We all saw that, he's like wow, that's how we're believing in 2001. And in there, the main ship's computer was one huge computer. Because back then in 1968, if you want a more powerful computer, it had to be bigger. This whole idea that that the computers get small as more and are carried on your hip.

49:49That's not a thought. They're linearly extrapolating things. They got sort of FaceTime in a tablet, correct? A little bit. Okay, we can cherry pick that and say, wow, look how brilliant they were, they got this correct. I can tell you this, that in 2001, oh, there's a quote from the futurist, the magazine, the... Are they C -Clark? The, it says, in the year 2000, There will be 50 ,000 people living and working in space. That was, maybe he was trying to think exponentially, but he definitely got that wrong, okay? In the year 2003 people were living and working in space. So, space has a unique problem.

50:29Yes, it's expensive. Where, up until Sputnik launched, space was an inaccessible domain and people imagine it would be centuries before we landed on the moon. When Spotnik was launched, everyone went into exponential mode, but they aired in the wrong way and I'll tell you why in a minute. Kennedy announces we're going to the moon before the decade is out and he said that at a time we didn't yet have a vessel that could launch and not blow up that was capable of carrying people. It was prophetic. This was a badass prediction. It was. Okay? Before the decade is out. All right. So, he says this. And then everyone who's trying to predict the future, who are in the moon by 1969, will be on Mars by 1980, 1985.

51:24And of course, the space task group, you know, part of the White House was predicting by 1984 that we would be going to Mars. Yeah, they were clueless. They were clueless on budgets. No, no, it's had budget is irrelevant here. For the reasons I will about to say. Educate me. So the problem that, oh by the way, I wrote a whole other book on this. It was titled, when I submitted it, Failure to launch the dreams and delusions of space enthusiasts because the predictions never match the reality. And the public said, no, we can't have delusion and failure in the title, so got reworded space chronicles facing the ultimate frontier.

52:12Took all the teeth out of the title. Here's the problem. Everyone naively presumed, well we're Americans and we're explorers, that's why we're going to the moon and this is a natural progression of exploration. And at no time did anyone ask themselves, why are we doing it? They presumed it's because it's in our DNA. No, it may be in our DNA, but it doesn't happen unless somebody pays for it. And who's going to pay for it, not just anybody, not just the National Science Foundation, not just NASA, if somebody's got to write the check. Who's going to write the check? Congress. And so when Kennedy says, we'll put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth, we think that's the stirring rhetoric of a future thinking young president.

52:59Excuse me, let's go back to that same speech. Delivered on May 25th, 1961, to a joint session of Congress. Oh, what happened just six weeks before that? Yerega -Garren had been launched into space and came back safely. What's the date? April 12th, 1960. Thank you, Loretta. Oh! April 12th, 1961. And six weeks to that, a joint session of Congress is called. Oh, by the way, I have to slip in, put a pin in that. Why, why did we lose our ship? Lose our poop when the spotnik launched? I'll tell you why. Spotnik, a radio transmitter was launched in the hollowed out shell of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

53:53So if that could be deployed over our country, that meant Russia could deliver a nuclear warhead over our space. And back then, there were international restrictions on access to your air space. You can't just fly anywhere unless you have permission. But there was no treaty about your space, space above your air. So there it was. We lost it. We told it within a year, NASA was founded. a unit daylight and this became a military priority. Thank you. Oh, under the way. It does go back to budget. No, wait, it's not just budget. Budget's like put a number here or a number there. I'm talking about motivation because in that state, back to Kennedy speech, go to Cape Canaveral.

54:41This Kennedy Space Center there, the center, the front entrance is a bust of Kennedy chiseled in the granite are those words, put a man on the moon, return him safely to earth before it's there and you just say yeah. In that same speech, here's what he said several paragraphs earlier. I quote, if the events of recent weeks couldn't even other than man's name, Yuri Gagarin, if the events of recent weeks are any indication of the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, then we need to know the world, the path of freedom, over the path of tyranny. That was the battle cry against communism that dislodged the money to go to the moon.

55:29That's what did it. It's not just budget with, add the budget. It's, what is your motivation? I agree with you. It was the, I don't want to die. But it was, anyway, listen. What I'm saying is, and what I'm saying is, this is a rich country. We can do whatever we want if we all agree to it. So it's really not a matter of a budget. It's a matter of motivation. What is motivating? OK? OK? It's not a budget about what motivates our guy to fly across the Atlantic. He had a paycheck at the other end of that. That was about budget. It was my motivation. OK? So I wrote an essay late 1990s for the Columbia History of the 20th century.

56:11And it was called Paths to Discovery. And I wanted to assess what were the drivers, not the budgets, the drivers of people doing major, major projects, civilization committing to major projects. And if I could find out what motivated people over the centuries and millennia, maybe I could find a way to motivate people to go to Mars, because it's really expensive. Let's find out what the motivational side set up this table. At the end there are only three motivators. Not five. Fear, curiosity, and greed. Curiosity is not one of the motivators. Do you know what you're gonna learn to do? Do you know what to do?

56:51I did the work! Okay, this is what I'm saying. But I can't find. There's three motivators. I've got something to add. It says nothing to do with curiosity. Nothing to do with curiosity. That's the problem here. Okay? Number one drive is the, I don't wanna die motivator. That's the fear. We'll give you that. I don't wanna die. Okay, next I don't want to die poor so that's the money one. That's great. The third one is the will perceived will or real will of royalty or deity Much less in operation today than it was in past centuries So list the most expensive things humans have ever done. There's like the great pyramids There's the Manhattan Project.

57:39There's the Apollo Project. There's the Emanginal Project. Well, not the most expensive thing. I'm totally expensive. All right, there's only three billion. That's nothing. I know. I got that in my pocket. Left pocket. OK? They can be big without me. I'm talking about expensive in human and physical capital. The cathedral building of Europe. And you can list them. We can quibble on the sequence. But all of them will be drawn from one of those three drives. Do you know what the modern time removed the royalty and deity it leaves economics and War and I'm telling you that everyone thinks we went to the moon for curiosity sake and because that's what they thought They believed we keep going the moment we got to the moon looked over our shoulder and the rest we're right there We they weren't there we ended the Apollo program.

58:28We did we got Apollo 18 60 years more to go and six minutes on the clock Oh, sorry. So, so I will say this, there is a, there is a, sorry, there is a scientific ratio of the motivator of fear to curiosity and it's the ratio of the defense budget to the science budget. Yeah, that ratio was infinite. Yeah, unfortunate. 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. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a syndolytic that kills senile cells in your skin.

59:11And 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. All right, so I'm going to finish up the 1990s by saying we've got the death of top computer, we've got women entering the workforce, we've got the transistors, you know, creating the entire chip revolution, we go to the moon nine times, a pretty good time. 1990 to 2020, let's take it to this last 30 year segment, a lot occurring there. Yes, so 1960 to 1990, that's obvious.

59:52The Cold Cold War, all of this, 1990 to 2020, that's in the lifetime of most of us in this room, I remember it 1990 with the dial -up modem to try to get back to my computer at my office. The internet wasn't really a thing yet and in the movie you got mail, people look forward to the email. Oh my gosh. Oh, I got mail. Let me like stop everything and go read it. All right. Here's one of my favorites is 1989. If you had a fax machine, you were badass. Fax machine. Okay. 1989 was the release date of back to the future part two, which took place in the year 2015. Okay? So back to Future Park 2 was made in 1989, released in 1989, took place in 1989 and they go to the future 2015.

1:00:57So you get to see how they imagine it. Fine. If you remember the movie, our lead character, Marty, he retakes his bosses, his boss, and he gets fired. Well, he's living in a home of the future. And any Home in 1989 has one fax machine that home has four fax machines. That's the home of the future and the boss alerts him that he's fired and you see this montage of fax machines showing that you're fired, you're fired, you're fired. And by the fax machine is dot matrix in the future. Oh my God. We sequence the human genome during this period of time. Yes. Pretty extraordinary. Yes. Three billion dollars today.

1:01:39Right, I got one other thing. I got to finish the facts and I'll do it. Okay, okay Old -timers will remember early 1990s AT &T had a series of ads called you will and they asked have you ever wanted to Whatever and they say you will an AT &T will bring it to you So they're imagining the future. They got a lot right. I don't I'm gonna take it away from it But one of them they show somebody doing something I've never thought of doing never wanted to do never will do never did do It was somebody on a beach chair on the surf, okay, and the sand. And he's working on a tablet. That was a good prediction.

1:02:18And he says, have you ever wanted to send a fax from the beach? You will! So, it's like, that's linear thinking, the future. So, if I were to leave people with a lesson, it's try to break out of your linear thinking. And imagine what other technologies might come from the side. That you think you're not even thinking of convergence. That's what the smartphone is. The smartphone didn't invent GPS, it didn't invent digital storage, it didn't even invent touch screen. Or the digital camera. Or the digital camera. The touch screen in fact was invented by a, And it was NSF, a grant to the archives, to the US archives, the museum grouping of the archives, because they didn't want people typing on keyboards to get information.

1:03:13And so they developed this screen that can respond to you as you were a tourist moving through the facility. That's how we got invented. It was the innovation just for that. And that then has transformed our lives in almost every way. Little things like that. And today, if you show someone, you bring someone from 1990 to today and they take them to a restaurant and they say, well, where's the menu? They say, what's that little pattern of dots in the middle of the table? They can't, they won't, wait. Can we get a taxi? Now, I'll just pull out my smartphone. What's a smartphone? By the way, it would be 17 years from 1990 before the smartphone arrived.

1:04:00So this whole thing about, well, I have a cellphone. And that, you know, don't you all remember seeing the movie Wall Street? And I remembered seeing Gecko on the beach with his shoulder mounted cellphone. And I said, wow, I wish I was rich so I could have a phone like that and talk without out any wires and it was like, I thought it was my imagining the future and I had no idea what the future would bring. And last thing, last thing, and. Sir, you have kids? This is my 100 year old man in the front row. So, had your kids sent to you that one day, I wanna go up and be a YouTube influencer. So, and I wanna out earn any money you've ever made in your life doing it.

1:04:51You, I don't, this is, these are conversations. This is the thing. We don't even know how to have them. Yes. I will just put the hell of it. Go ahead. You're here in LA. I'm drunk. We don't have this in New York yet. We'll go to the other street. And that's a car with no driver going back. It's like, we as the driver, what is that? It's a, I'm making left turns. It's, you've seen these, right? L .A. people, it's these like the driverless cars. They're just in the middle of the traffic. Like where's it going? I don't know. But it feels like it knows it belongs there, right? Because it's got all the sensors, the cameras and things.

1:05:30So I don't know. People said in 2020, let's imagine 2050. You can't. You can't. You're not. So that's my favorite request on stage. Can you give us a prediction for 2050? I'll do it. I can barely give it to prediction for 23. I still do it, but I'm doing it in the spirit of How humbled I would be when the actual 2050 comes based on what I've researched for the past 150 years So you're that I'm gonna make three predictions I'm gonna make three predictions one We will have Designer drugs. They'll analyze your genome find drugs. They will have no side effects for you Why do we have to be a statistic in the reported side effects?

1:06:14You know, I'm not very side effect prone, so I generally ignore that, but many people are. So figure that out, medical community, so that there are no side effects. Have the medicine do only what it's supposed to do. Don't make it make you throw up or give you diarrhea or depressive thoughts or dresses. Fix that. Okay, that's one. Two. I think in the not -too -difficent future, all cars on the road will be self -driving electric. And you say, no, that can't be fair. No, no, but because we went from horses to cars in ten years, I'm just talking about going from cars to another kind of car. That can surely be less time than going from horses to cars.

1:06:59self driving and you know you start that only self driving cars in the H .O .V. lane. Then these cars know where all the other cars are. If you want to change lanes it tells you the other car I'm changing lanes now they part it changes lanes. And they can even text and drive at the same time with no loss of their their acuity on the road because they're freaking electric computers. And they can drive 120 miles an hour with two cars distance between them because there's not going to be something they don't anticipate. And so once you see that, cutting down your travel time, I think it's going to go quickly.

1:07:41And suppose you're a car enthusiast, what do you do? I like my classic car. There will be car parks for you to drive. Is that any different from people who like riding horses and you go to the stables and ride horses? It's quaint, a quaint memory of a bucolic past. So you've got your Ferrari, whatever, if you park it at the car park, you'll take an electric car to get there and you can do your thing as we now people who ride horses. So I see that happening. Last thing, I'd like to see space, people have to wish we go next and space, all of space. Why does it have to be a next destination? When we built the interstate system, which to the tune of $100 billion, by the way, about the same as going to the moon, what drove that?

1:08:35Well, war drove that. What's the other name for the interstate system? Old timer? I scratch in his head. that the Eisenhower internet system. He went to Europe in the Second World War, saw the Autobahn survive under rain and snow and tanks could roll over without it falling off the side of the road. He says, I want that in my country as a defense project. And so the initial monies for that all came from the defense. We're informed by our posture as a country that didn't want to get invaded and wanted to keep our military ready on the end. You may know the interstate system doesn't go over mountains, it goes through them.

1:09:19And after every distance, there's a certain stretch that is straight so that you can land an airplane on it if you have to. It is two military specs. That's how that money got dislodged. So I'm saying when you build the interstate, you don't build, let's just go from New York to LA. Now, give people choices. So you send the interstate everywhere, let people's creativity take them to wherever they want, to start whatever businesses they want, or have whatever free life they want to lead in a country that we still think is free. And so when I think of space, I think of not a rocket to go here or there, get a warehouse sort of strap on boosters.

1:09:59And I say, I want to do science on the back side of this comet that's coming through. We need these three boosters in this rocket and we'll schedule a launch in three months. Think about that. I do. The entire solar system becomes our backyard. And it's not this other place. It is a, we will have a relationship with it. And yeah, let's mine some asteroids. We have wars on earth over the limited access to resources that are plentiful in the universe in our own backyard. The future space is one where an entire category of warfare will be rendered obsolete because access to resources will be unlimited.

1:10:43We'll still fight over which God's you worship or what your skin color is probably, but this category of war would be gone forever. If the entire solar system had lanes that you would take and you decided where you wanted to go and it wasn't something a single national destination. And the only thing we know about these predictions are they're gonna be wrong. Yes.

1:11:16Alright everybody, let's give it up for me and we've got to exercise it.

1:11:27Thank you. I'm sick of you. Come on. I'm sick of you. Come here. It's the old timer right here. We got it. All right. We are we are woefully over schedule, but I cannot not take a few questions, which is which is the definitive side of saying let me take a few questions here. Okay. Okay. All right. So we've got microphones. Okay, so raise your hand, kids first. Okay, so we've got two over here. The microphone givers, you decide. Come on, come on, come on, listen to him. Head up out.

1:12:13When you were mentioning all of the innovations in the different periods, you didn't list contraception. Now there's a thousand ones we didn't list. Well, I know, but that's I think it's a really specific one, particularly where we are. Okay, so important. Yes, there are advances that are very important in our culture, especially in health and well -being. You know, there's discovery of vaccines, but that goes even farther back. There's the discovery of sanitation, these are contributed to our life expectancy. It's not just the discovery of contraception, it's the how widely available it became and how inexpensive it was.

1:12:52Women enter the workforce, women's right to vote. So all of these things occurred during the last century. At the exact same time that you said that voting rights. So that period of time, that was a huge social change. Women in the workforce, women being able to decide. Half the population. Yeah. So I just wanted to comment on that. Yeah, yeah. OK. So I tried to keep the advances international. And votes came to different people at different times. OK. We've got two microphones over here. These are important. Yes. I can tell you this that there are people say, oh, it's worst ever for women or blacks or trans or I'm okay.

1:13:26No, it's not worse than ever. If I had a time machine and I said, you can go in here and put any time you want to go in the past or the future, if you are a female person of color on the gender spectrum, there is no time in the past that you would choose. It was much better in 1960 when the Sunday paper, the Sunday paper had a section all time, I remember this. Sunday paper had a section, it was called the women's section. It had the recipes and the, okay? That, that, the women had their place. All that's different and gone. And so I'm saying, those, if you're not white male, go to the future, not the past.

1:14:11In this time machine. All right, yeah. Can't tell, say let's go over here and then we'll come here. Please, good. Yes, you. Hi, I'm an undergrad student. I think I'm the only one here. So you are a big portion of my childhood and why science was cool in the late 90s or 2000s. But my question is, what would your 12 year old self say to you now?

1:14:40I don't know. I mean, my 12 year old self showed up right here. Yeah, I think you say you're pretty cool. I don't know, I haven't thought about that. What does it probably mean? It's like, you can actually make a career at the universe? That's probably what I, because I, Let's flip the question. What would you tell your 12 year old self now? No, she did not ask that question. That question, everybody asked that one. I'm saying, but you're not answering. When I was 12, I was not certain. Because I knew at age nine, I was interested in the universe. By age 11, you ask me what I want to be when I grew up, I say astrophysicist, okay, to that annoying question that adults ask kids.

1:15:26So, by age 12, I'm not entirely certain I can make a career of being an astrophysicist. So, I made sure that I went into college, I majored in physics, which is many more pathways from it than just astrophysics. My college degrees in physics, and I even considered engineering just to broaden the job spectrum for me to come out. So I would just be delightfully surprised that what my deep interest at age 12 could be pursued all the way into adulthood. Excellent. Yes. One last question. All right, I just want to thank you for carrying the torch of Carl Sagan for the love of science and just bringing it to the Grinch.

1:16:11Thank you Carl famously said when you're in love you want to tell the world so yes, I agree

1:16:20So what I want to ask you is if you had to choose an ex -price in astrophysics What would you choose? If you have to create an ex -price for astrophysics What I would choose to be the same is what would get a Nobel Prize? No, you're asking what would you want the world to work on that is a 10X bold problem, a moonshot, something that people don't think is possible, but if enough people work on it, it might get... Scour the solar system for life that has a genesis other than what occurred on Earth. But if that happened, it would get a Nobel Prize. So we don't need the ex -price for the science.

1:17:03I think, because we have our reward system built in. But the Nobel Prize is a retrospective for something done in the past. It's about incentivizing new people to come in and take on something that's world -situated. Some foundations we should be doing, but people feel too limited. You mean a single goal that'll, okay, How about... Not have my own personal ex -price. I want suborbital flight so that I can go to Tokyo have lunch and come back for dinner to New York. Because if you're suborbital, any two places on earth are within 45 minutes of each other. That gets pitched every other year here at Bissionary.

1:17:41So where is it? Where is it? Okay. And so... Asteroid mining. Asteroid detection. Yeah, but we got that. Yeah, but I like the mining. Asteroid mining. The first person who will group who can send a lander to an asteroid, dig, get material from it, and bring it back to Earth. Or take it to the moon where it might be useful for colonies that would be set up there. How's that for an expiry? That sounds great. Astero expiry. Unless the McCost is getting... Alright everybody, again, let's give it up for Neil and Grass Tyson.