Cosmic Queries - Black Hole Universe

0:00Paul, there were a lot of cosmology questions in there. Oh, it's a big bang multiverse black holes. Negative gravity. Yeah. Yeah. People into that. Yeah. I see you as a negative gravity person. Tend to be negative. Coming up, Cosmic Queries on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. This is going to be a Cosmic Queries Grab Bag Edition. And to help me get through these questions, I got Paul Mercurio. Paul, how you doing, man? I'm doing well. It's Baron Paul Mercurio.

0:46Baron. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Not Baron as in you cannot reproduce. Your womb is Baron. No. I actually am. I'm trying to keep that under wraps. You have one son, so that's evidence that. I'm done. By the way, look at you all dressed up like a little schoolboy. Look at you. I dressed up for you. Clearly, you have no such reciprocal feeling for me. Well, because you asked me to help you move furniture, and so that's what I did. Plus, you're out of a job now. I'm out of a job. What the hell happened down there? What did you do? What did you do to piss off Paramount? Apparently, I broke CBS and Paramount, apparently, on the Late Show.

1:27Right, because you're on the staff of the Late Show. I work on the Late Show, perform on the show, and we are not going to be in existence come May. Wow. And I am going to be sleeping outside in your bushes looking for any nickels I can find. I live in lower Manhattan. I don't have bushes in my backyard. We're going to get you something. Yeah, so, you know, I'm looking, you know, whatever. All right. You know, if you know anybody. If I know someone who needs a long mode. Needs an ex-lawyer. Ex-lawyer. I forgot. You went to law school. Investment banker. I could do M &A deals and make you laugh and make you ravioli all at the same time.

2:02Come on. But I'm barren. In case people are wondering, during one of our Patreon exclusive segments, one of our Patreon members, where they get to view a Q &A session live, felt sorry for Paul Mercurio for not having a title. And he came up with a great one. Commensurate with Lord Nice of Chuck Nice. So he got knighted some number of episodes ago. So they felt pity upon you. As a lot of people do. And so they decided to call you Baron. Yes. I thought Baron, that feels right. Baron Paul Mercurio. I have a presence. I command attention. I felt that work. And so I happened to have Excalibur in the office.

2:45Why wouldn't I? I got everything else. I got Excalibur. And so I knighted you. Right. Baron Paul Mercurio. Cut me on the neck. Eight stitches. but otherwise it was great. So I'm honored and I want to thank the Patreon exclusive. How did you know it was an accidental cut? What makes you think that was an accident? I need security when I come on this show. Tamsin's got my back. So we're going to do some... Yeah, let's do some Q &A here. All right. Just some general grab bag. But you're at least employed through June, is that correct? Through May. May. May. In 2026. Unless something happens and I screw something else up and get us fired earlier.

3:21Okay. But May. All right. And I'm also doing my off-Broadway show, Permission to Speak, touring with it. And we have it on Patreon now, so people can go and enjoy it there and support it. Because I don't have any money. I'm poor. I'm out of a job. You know, I'm eating hay, if you care. I'm a baron. I shouldn't be eating hay. I'm a baron, okay? All right, here we go. Opal Lehman. Hello, everyone. Opal from Atlanta. Lana, I'm 15 years old and was wondering, you said recently that we only know 4 % of the universe. Well, Neil does, we know more. 4 % of the universe, which includes everything we know.

3:59So do you think there are more types of science out there left, sorry, to create or discover, or would the rest of what we would know about the universe just be branches of what we already know? Love that question. Yeah, it's a great question. Ooh, good one, good one. So let me not just, let me never say that something's just a branch of something else that makes it sort of subservient to it. Let me give a slightly longer answer than he might have bargained for. Oh, good. Beginning in the 1990s. You know it's bad when Neil says it's going to be a long answer. Top. In the 1990s, NASA realized that there was some scientific questions that needed answering that did not sit comfortably within the - Known body of knowledge.

4:49The stove. Yes, but certainly not even within the siloed sciences as they have been laid out, as we've come to think of them in college. You're majoring in chemistry, I'm majoring in physics, I'm majoring in this, majoring in that. nature doesn't draw those boundaries we did right so one of the questions was origins origins of life is that just biology no life began on a planet in a solar system stellar or no no just the forces operating on this and how is a biologist going to answer that question without knowing what the sun was doing at the time life began what earth was doing and so what NASA created where these origin centers, rather they created funding umbrellas, origins funding umbrellas, where you could enter into the room with the figurative room from all these different branches of science.

5:45And they would come together and ask questions of each other. Because they're interdependent. Interdependent to answer this other question. Some of these questions. I don't want to call that a spinoff. I want to say that's a whole brand new way to explore the world. Right. So. An extrapolation or an extension of. So, yes, there is new sciences to be plumbed. I don't want to think of them as an entire branch of science. I'd like to think of them as new things out there where people with different expertise may have to come together to address those questions. And I would say that being said, probably the newest science out there is neuroscience.

6:25We're in our infancy. and I look forward to when it's in its maturity. Then we nip, tuck and fix all your, especially your mental problems. Well, you need a nip and a tuck. You really do. That's not even a real mustache, anybody. What about AI? Does AI potentially bring us to, not either through the use of AI or AI itself, other types of science or the uses of various sciences? I haven't seen AI. That doesn't mean it won't still happen, but AI at its best today, I've yet to see, discover something that was not otherwise on the internet. It's putting together things on the internet but suppose you had a thought that no one ever thought of before and it's not on the internet.

7:13Does AI have access to that thought? The answer is no. Could AI come up with that thought? That's my question. If it can't come up with a thought that none of us have ever had, nor have ever put it on the internet. There's a limit to where AI can take us. But my thought is a manifestation of several things that I know, and the chances are statistically that AI knows some of those things as well. Of course. Not just chances, it does. Provided those things are online. Right, which statistically probably are. So it could probably formulate the same question. Not as good as mine, if I'm really smart.

7:48Definitely, my point is, to make a completely new discovery. Could AI come up with the general theory of relativity? Could AI have invented cubism? Cubism doesn't look like it came from much before it. There's no early cubistic paintings of Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo. Can you tell me what branch of science we can use that compels people to take their bike on the subway? It's a bike. Ride the bike. It's not a moving bike rack. I don't take my car to the airport and check it on the plane. It is a little weird. No, it's a lot weird, and it needs to stop. It's a little weird. And I don't care if they live in New York or don't.

8:31Try to get it out of your way. They'll lift up the front wheel. They'll tuck it to the side where the door is. And their handlebars end up my butt, and that's not what I paid$290 for, whatever I'm paying. Okay, so the neuroscience surgery will adjust that first in your brain. Don't defend it. Please. Dalmier de Silva. De Silva? Dalmir da Silva. Hey, Dr. Tyson. Oh, this is from Brazil. Brasil. Brado Zalanzo, Brazil. Assuming I got this right, we can intuitively think of Hawking radiation as matter escaping a black hole when a pair of virtual particles is created outside of it. That is precisely correct.

9:10Okay, so you got that part right, and you get a dishwasher. The antiparticle falls into the black hole and annihilate itself with its counterpart already in the black hole. This sounds like a movie. Leaving the other one loose to fly away. And since particles don't have identity. Big adjustment there. It wouldn't have to be the antiparticle, but one of those two particles would fall in. One of the two. Okay. And since particles don't have identity, it's like that particle just escaped from the BH. My question is. The BH. The BH. He's on a friendly basis with the black hole. No black hole ever told me I could call it BH.

9:54Well, you know, someday you'll be cool enough. You got to hang out with the cool kids to hang out with the BH. The question is, why do black holes favor antiparticles? The creation of virtual particles should be random all the time, every direction. So it should be 50-50. Yeah, and my understanding is that's the case, as is his understanding. If I'm wrong, I don't know why I'm wrong. Because when the particle, antiparticle pair is created, the momentum that they have is in random directions. So it's by quantum design random. So they have to go exactly opposite directions so that their momentum cancel, okay, into that spot.

10:42At the same speed? Well, sorry. It depends on what the momentum was of the photons that begat the particles. The point is, everything has to check out in the end. And when it checks out, check out meaning arithmetically balance out. So my understanding is you could just as equally have an antiparticle in the black hole as a particle. If it's not that, I don't know why it's not that. And if that's the case, we've got to check with Jan 11 on that. So yeah, his whole question is predicated on something that I also don't think is true. Which is? That only the antiparticles fall back in, and the regular particles escape.

11:20But we don't have proof of that. Isn't that the case? No, I'm saying, if it's true that only the antiparticles go in, I don't know why that's true. Any understanding I have of particle pair creation, they fly off in opposite directions, and that set of directions are random to each other. So you can just as easily have a regular particle going in as an antiparticle. So he's right. to be suspicious of this. Right. It should be 50-50. I'm thinking, yes. Yeah. Okay. Got it. All right. Great question.

12:01Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son, Ernie, because we listen to StarTalk every night and support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse, Tyson.

12:22This is Prateek Nagar. Hello, Dr. Tyson. My name is Zariah, 12 years old. I'm from Salt Lake City, Utah. I love watching your explainers and the fun and knowledge that comes with it. While in class, the question came up in size, which are we humans closer to? The universe or an atom? I was very intrigued by this question, especially because atoms are incomprehensibly small and the universe is incredibly big. if we are closer to the size of the universe, could there be a time knowing that the universe is expanding that we are closer to the size of an atom? Cool question. Yeah. I've actually answered that question in my next book.

12:59Whoa. Called Just Visiting This Planet. Mm-hmm. And I will read you that question and answer from my book. Okay. If I may. Yes. Can someone pass my computer? Go ahead. Read me a bedtime story. May I read you a bedtime story? Yes. So as you may know, for 12 or so years, I wrote a question and answer column for the public under a pen name, Merlin. That's why I have Excalibur in this office. I didn't know you did that. Because me and Merlin go way back. You're tight. You're like this, literally. We're tight. We're totally tight. And so people ask Merlin these questions. Merlin was the pen name. So here it is, if I may.

13:42Dear Merlin, I am six feet tall. Comparatively speaking, which is the farthest away from my eye? The atomic particles in my little toe or the most distant galaxies? That's the same question. Right. Since you're only six feet tall, there is no doubt that the distant galaxies are farther from your eyeballs than your pinky toe. Another way to address your inquiry, however, is to imagine you suddenly became 10 times taller, 10 times taller again, and so forth. After about 25 of these stretching exercises, your head will brush up against the most distant galaxies in the visible universe. Returning to your eyeball, imagine you now shrink in successive steps so that each shift takes you within one-tenth of the distance to the atoms in your toe.

14:34So we increase by factors of 10, decrease by factors of 10. It would take only 15 shrinks to enter the nuclei of your toe atoms. Adding the two sets of jumps reveals that the entire known universe spans about 40 powers of 10. In one direction. No, you add them together, it's 40 powers of 10. But this seems... From small to large. And I don't mean this... So what this means is you are closer to the atoms in your toe. It's only 15 powers of 10 down, and it's 25 powers of 10 to the edge of the universe. Right, and I'm not trying to— That's the only way to answer that question. This seems like—I'm not saying this to be— Oh, by the way, that book is Just Visiting This Planet.

15:18Available October 2025. Okay. Not available in paperback. This seems like an obvious question that doesn't even need to be asked. And I don't mean that to be mean-spirited, but like to me, I'm a complete lay person. The answer was your toe. Of course it's 15 versus 25. No, you didn't know that in advance. These are powers of 10. I understand, but there's no question that the atoms in your toe are going to - If I take a tape measure, the toe is six feet away and the universe is 14 billion light years. Right. If you want to say it's obvious, the answer is obvious, that's what you should be citing.

15:55But in powers of 10, it's not obvious. At all. This question wasn't in the context of Powers of Ten. But that's the only sensible way to answer it in the way they were debating it in their class. Elevate yourself to the level of the 12-year-old. In this class, okay. Man, you were asking a lot of me today. That's impossible. Okay, so online, there's a, on YouTube somewhere, it was there, there's a 10-minute movie called Powers of Ten. It was made in the 1970s, 78. and it starts with a man laying down at a picnic in a park outside of Chicago. And we start with a scene one meter wide and one meter tall of a man.

16:42And every 10 seconds, we're going to go 10 times farther away. And we do that. And you see how many jumps. It's an early CGI, but it wasn't even used computers. It was very well done in its day. 10 times farther away. Every 10 seconds. And you go to the edge of the universe. They said, now, then we zoom back, and it says, now we're going to go 10 times closer every 10 seconds. And so you go 10 times closer. And it takes fewer 10 times. It's 10, right? Right. And that's all I'm saying is it's obvious that that would take 15 10s to my toe. You were not thinking in powers of 10 to justify saying that.

17:22You don't know what I was thinking. That's true. I don't know what you were thinking. And that's why this relationship is never working. then we need marriage counseling because you don't bother to think what I think. So I think we hooked up a guy with his answer. Very good question. Yes. And this is 12 years old. Amazing. All right, this is Master Builder EJ. No, but he's one of our fans, so it's not amazing that he says that. It's expected.

17:45Can't even give a compliment. All right, average question, 12-year-old. Try better the next time. That's Neil talking, not me. I thought it was amazing. Hello, everyone. This is Ethan Henning from Houston, Texas. I have a question about power sources. What would be the best power source for a moon base that would have the purpose of mining and sustaining the lives of astronauts for six months? Could it be fission? Maybe it's solar. I would love to know what you think. I love this podcast. It's my favorite. Ask me why I'm dressed up. I lied to you and said I dressed up for you at the beginning of this.

18:21Why are you dressed up? Because hours ago, I was on CBS Mornings, their morning show. Oh, right. I fell asleep during that segment. They asked me. So I get dressed up for TV, but with a little bit of, you know. You look good. Yeah, when you come on the late show, which I work on, you wear a tie or you got your vest. I show some tie. Or the vest. The vest. One or the other. Yeah. Both would be. A little much. It would break the lens. Yeah. So people will bleed from their eye sockets. So they asked me about Nukes on the Moon. and first we're making portable not quite the right word transportable nuclear power plants that could like fit in a truck for example if in a truck it can fit in a big rocket okay and these are nuclear fission power plants we've talked about this on the show needing a portable nuclear plants uh to drive a ai and what you would do is if you have a a a computation farm somewhere where AI is intensely using energy.

19:22You take it off, yeah, you're calculating for Bitcoin. You just take it off the grid, give it its own power supply. You can't put it near a waterfall or this, and then you don't know if the sun is shining all the time. A nuclear power transportable power plant, the word plant overstates it at that level. Power station. Power station, then, yeah. Yeah, that was the expert that we had on the show that talked about. Exactly, we did. There's going to be a lot of those. We did. So right now, NASA is considering fast-tracking a nuclear power generator about the size that I described. And one of those would give you 100 kilowatts.

19:58Are you kilowatt fluent? Yeah. You lie, brother. Okay, no. KW? See, I know. I'm not dumb. I'm smart. I'm not dumb. Let's become fluent together. You ready? Yeah. So 100 kilowatts, kilo is what? Mm-hmm, 1 ,000. 1 ,000, so 100 ,000 watts. Okay, that's the power that it can generate, 100 ,000 watts. Do you know the power drain of a hair dryer? I'd say a kilowatt. Yeah, 1 ,000 watts. Okay, so how many hair dryers could 100 kilowatt power generator? 100 ,000.

20:41I'm sorry, what did you ask? Let's try this again. I wasn't listening. Apparently. 100 ,000 watts generator. Your hair dryer draws 1 ,000 watts. Oh, 10 ,000, yeah. Wasn't that the question? It started from scratch. All right, okay, go ahead. 100 ,000 watts, a kilowatt, okay? 100 ,000 watts. A hair dryer uses 1 ,000 watts. So how many hair dryers can this sustain? it's uh a thousand you're just pulling it out of your

21:20100 000 watts yeah so the hair drive is a thousand watts it can sustain 100 hair drive right okay so that's the energy level that nasa is looking at to create and send to the moon right now so it's not some mondo power plant i can keep 50 hair dryers going right on the moon right okay And by the way, you wouldn't need a hair dryer because it's 200 degrees Fahrenheit. That's true. Just stick your head out the window. Just stick your head out the window for a second, right? It'll completely dry. So these power plants at that size and with that wattage can run for eight to 10 years. How do they deal with maintenance and that kind of thing?

21:58No, no, these are, this new generation, there's no maintenance. No maintenance at all. And it's very efficient in how it distributes heat and it's not going to over melt down. It's nuclear fission of fissionable uranium, which is not the same uranium as you might learn from an explainer we did on isolating uranium for energy or for bombs. So there's how pure the uranium is for what your use might be. It's got to be really pure if you're going to make a bomb out of it. If you're going to make a power station, it doesn't have to be that pure. And so it's much more readily obtainable. So nukes would do it for eight years.

22:38You never have to maintain it. If you had solar panels, by the way, no matter where the sun is in the sky on the moon, it's just as bright as it is anywhere else because there's no atmosphere. So the sun is just as bright on the horizon as it is directly overhead. So you can have solar panels that just track the sun. It'll get 100 % sunlight as long as the sun is above the horizon. Do you know how long a day lasts on the moon? uh 24 hours the moon's hmm it lasts a month what is what do you think the word month came from have you thought about it no way how long it takes the moon ah okay that's all the moon goes around the earth right but as it does that it has uh and it goes through phases as it's doing that that is experiencing a lunar day.

23:28So a lunar day is a month. A month long. Okay, so two weeks of - I thought you had a speech impediment. That's why you stared at me like, what does he say? Like a dog? Yeah, exactly. So two weeks of sunlight, two weeks of darkness. So you got two weeks of solar power generation. Problem is, if you exceed your power needs, the energy's gotta go to somewhere, so put it to storage batteries. When it's dark for two weeks, okay? You might want to use the energy. However, batteries don't work well in the cold. As soon as the sun sets, the temperature drops from 200 degrees Fahrenheit to 200 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

24:07And then it'll just... We haven't been able to come up with a battery that... We haven't. You'd have to, like, insulate the batteries and have some other heating source. So... Just put a Tesla up there. Just take care of it. Have you driven a Tesla in the winter? The battery? Took me an hour to get across town when it should have taken me five minutes. So, yes. Yes, nuclear fission makes complete sense given what we've done with it lately. You can create a reactor and just send it to the moon. One last question on this, then we'll move on. So how do you protect the reactor from whatever something could hit it, what could happen on the moon?

24:42Yeah, a meteor could hit it because there's no atmosphere and there's nothing protecting you. A meteor could also hit you. You could say, we finally have it protected. Bam, now you're dead. No, I'm coming to your house and I'm going to just hide under the couch. Yeah, so a big enough meteor you're not going to protect. Maybe you could bury it, for example, protect it that way. How far away are we from this realistically? The military already has prototypes that they're using of just the size I'm describing. And so I think we're very close within years, not decades. Yeah. All right, let's move on.

25:20Next question. Derek Evans, Dr. Tyson. and this is Derek from South Windsor, Connecticut. I know where that is. Long-time listener and attendee of live events. Nice. Thank you for coming to that. First-time Patreon support. We give three or four live events a year, typically in the region, one in Connecticut, the Beacon Theater here in Manhattan, and we sometimes go to Jersey and to Philly. But yeah. Those are great. I think you need a juggler at the beginning of it just to kind of loosen things up. In a recent conversation - You also juggle. I'm going to do anything come May. Whatever you - In a recent conversation you had about micro black holes, it had me wondering about interstellar travel.

25:58How could you travel vast distances while being sure to avoid these tiny black holes? And what time dilation or other unintended consequences would exist? Or do they radiate away fast enough not to pose any problems? So the larger the black hole, the slower it evaporates. It's obviously the inverse is then true. As the black hole gets smaller, the rate at which it radiates increases and grows exponentially. As it gets smaller. As it gets smaller. So it gets smaller, it gets smaller faster still. Because it's compressing on itself? No, it's not compressing. It's because its rate of evaporation has to do with its surface area.

26:38And the smaller it gets, the more surface area it has relative to the volume. It's an interesting fact about the geometry of surface area going as R squared, radius squared, and the volume going as R cubed of the sphere. Doesn't it decrease as it... It does, but the volume decreases faster than the surface area. And why is that? It's just the arithmetic of it. Because the volume is... Not a good enough answer. Specifically why. Don't duck the question. Don't be a politician. Answer. So this manifests, I think we have a whole episode on this. It's on size and life. So you can ask, here's a certain surface area you have, and how much flesh is associated with that surface area?