Our Burning Questions – Simulation Debate

26:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:The good thing about the internet is no one knows that you're a dog. That's funny. Right, right, right. And so who cares if it's biological or neurochemical, neuroelectronic? I don't think it matters. All that matters in the end is the behavior that you're interacting with. So what about self-awareness? Because that becomes, I mean, we don't, so what you just described, the consciousness is no longer functional once it stops the interaction. Because it's not being, if it's not being engaged, it's not asking questions. We ask questions irrespective of whether we are being engaged or not. We have questions of ourselves.

26:56We ask questions of the universe. We never stop asking questions, and we never stop having that conversation with ourselves. So that self-awareness is what we would say is an integral part of our consciousness. So what about that?

27:12Neil deGrasse Tyson:All right, so the self-awareness, if that only manifests to others, if they interact with you, then who cares? Whatever's going on in your head will never matter to me or anyone else in the world unless we interact with you. Unless we interact. Or unless we interact with decisions you made in your own head because of your thoughts. Right. And so one of Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics, forgive me if I can't recite them in order precisely. One of them is no matter what, you will not harm a human being. Yes. A human being. That's the first law of robotics. The first law. The second law is you will not allow harm to within your power.

27:59Neil deGrasse Tyson:You will not allow harm to occur to a human being. So you will prevent it if you can. Third one is you will protect your own existence provided it does not conflict with law one or two. Right. So your self-preservation is contingent upon the protection of human beings as well. In those three laws. So here you are thinking to yourself, I want to do this. I want to do that. I want to harm someone else. I will react when I see that engage, but I'm not going to respond to your pure thoughts. There was a whole Twilight Zone episode on that where this guy was flipping a coin and it landed on its edge.

28:43Neil deGrasse Tyson:And at that moment, he heard everyone's thoughts. And he walked into a bank and there was a bank guard. Banks used to have guards. There's a bank guard. And he heard the The bank guard's saying, when the bank closes, I'll take the keys and I'll steal the money from the vault. And I'll do that tonight. And so the guy's freaking out. He's calling the police on the bank guard. And then he learns that the bank guard just has these fantasies every single day. Every day. Every day. We all have thoughts. Right. And so if he never acts on them, it doesn't matter to anybody else. It's your own little world.

29:18Neil deGrasse Tyson:So if I'm a computer and you're not talking to me and I'm not having any thoughts, what do you care? You want to go in and say one is conscious and the other isn't when everyone's interaction with them is no different? So I'm not philosophically, I agree it makes a difference. In practice, I think it doesn't. That's my point. And the robot's going to want to protect itself. You can program into it that it wants to protect itself. There it is. Yeah, and so I see what you're saying. Like if I programmed into you compassion and that by doing so, I pretty much anticipate all the scenarios where compassion should be shown.

29:59Or I just make it a default setting where you show compassion even before you do anything else, which is, you know, kind of an understanding and acknowledgement and, you know. Wait, that'd be Jesus. You done made Jesus right there, right? I am Jesus, but... Bless you, my son. The thing is, everybody has to build in these guardrails. Everybody has to be the good actor, not the bad actor. And I don't think any of us in this conversation right now believe that that is always going to happen. There'll always be a bad actor.

30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson:Oh, yeah, yeah, but... But, Gary, that's true for humans. That'll also be true for robots. It's gotta be. For robotic humans. If I program the robot, like Chuck said, one variant is hugely compassionate and another doesn't have the guardrails, that robot is going to do harm just the way humans do harm. Right. And what do we do? We arrest them, try them, put them in jail. So, again, I think it's artificial to distinguish what you're made of versus how you actually get interacted with. And I'm going back to the Turing test. Okay. The one thing I would say about the sort of artificial, if you want, silicon intelligence, as opposed to a biological intelligence, is the biological intelligence is generally a low energy intelligence, whereas the other is a high energy consumer.

31:29Neil deGrasse Tyson:No. So the high energy one, you're talking about all of the AI farms where they're high energy consumption. Yeah. What's happening there is they are mining the whole internet of all of its information. It is having way better access to knowledge than you do with your own lonesome self. But a human mind doesn't consume anywhere near that amount of energy. But if you ask AI to think more deeply about a question than an average human does, I bet it's not using much energy either. Right. Okay. That's what I'm betting. See the point you're making. I'm just betting that. And that's when we'll start electing them to public office.

32:15Oh. Yeah. When they start using as much energy to think as we do. Is that another, is that a guardrail anyone's considered right now? What? That AI could not be or should be elected to an office.

32:34Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, I think because AI can be programmed to be completely rational, In my experience, no one likes rational leaders because they're not as susceptible to emotional appeals. Right. And I'm not saying I want it that way. I'm saying this is my read of how people behave. It's like in courts. They want to bring in a jury that can be emotionally swayed by arguments from a lawyer, not because the arguments are so logical, but because the arguments are emotional and passionate towards the goal of the law. the lawyer themselves. So it seems to me politicians need to be people who know how to listen to you and can internalize your feelings.

33:20Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's how you get to vote for them. What you could do is have an elected official who has this emotional connection, but this should be at least one member of their cabinet that's a completely logical bot. Now that's kind of cool. An advisor. It's a bot, logical advisor. So you say, I want to do this, that, and the other. And you go up and say, what do you think of that? And it says, that is a wonderful idea. However, you will be voted out in the very next election.

33:53Neil deGrasse Tyson:Or, that's a wonderful idea. You've already hit your term limits. Go ahead and do it. Exactly. Right. Yeah. So you got another one? Sure thing. This is Peter from Legal, our business affairs. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Peter says, there's an old saying, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today. I like that. Yeah, it's a pretty cool saying, huh? Unless the tree's life expectancy is less than 20 years. Okay. He says, with an eye toward a much needed future thinking effort that could begin today, if you were able to snap your fingers and make it so, what one thing would you change about the way children and young people are educated in the U.S.

34:45and even worldwide? In other words, where have we gone wrong in our approach to education and what would you do to correct that? Wow.

34:58Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay. So I have a lot of thoughts on this. and one day I'm going to write a book, an education book. Not yet. Because it's still percolating. I have a lot of ideas on this. But let me distill it down to just a couple of key points. One, we need to train people not what to know so much as how to think. Yes. How to see information and analyze it. Yes. Because we value what to know. You either know it or you don't. Do you know it? And you perform well on Jeopardy. but real solutions in this world come less from what you know and more than from what you can figure out when confronted with a problem that is yet to have been solved all right all right so in the workplace here's an example a little contrived but it's an example uh you hand a task to someone in a workplace i'm a manager and i hand a task and the two extreme responses one of is this was not in my job description.

36:00Neil deGrasse Tyson:I don't know. This is, no. Okay, that's one. All right. The other one is, wow, I've never seen this before. Give it to me. I will see what I can do with it. These are two completely different pathways of employees in a workplace. One of them will ossify in place. The other will continue to ascend. Do you see a new problem as something that someone else should solve because you're not trained or a new problem as something that you will gladly take on because you like solving the unknown. Schools should be taught as something where you solve problems more than as a place where you're just loaded with information.

36:41Neil deGrasse Tyson:So that's my first point. Second, we need to have schools where at the end of the day, you are sad that the school day has ended. Yeah. Think about that. So what you want is all day recess.

37:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:So think about it. You know, you're in class and you're looking up at the clock, can't wait for the buzzer to ring. At the end of the day, you can't wait for the day. At Friday, you can't wait until the weekend begins. At the end of a holiday, before the summer, even graduation day. You say you are now graduates and you toss your hat in the air. and you're celebrating that you don't have to continue to learn when that was your only job was to learn. And I'm not going to blame you. Of course, we have the rock anthem celebrating this. Schools out for summer. Summer. Schools out forever. Ever. Okay.

37:50Neil deGrasse Tyson:So I'm not blaming students for this. I'm blaming the school. Right. Because what's going on in the school where students can't wait to get out? And if what went on in the school was a celebration of learning, where your curiosity is fed every day, no one would want to leave school. You would want to stay in there and continue to be enlightened for every waking moment. A. B, it also means when you graduate, you graduate to a life of continued curiosity. a life of continued learning. And right now you have people getting out of high school. Let's say you don't go to college. You get out of high school, you get a job.

38:33Neil deGrasse Tyson:You say, I'm done with school. School's gone. Now you have just ossified in place because you are done learning. You don't buy any books. You got no curiosity beyond just your job's task. You want to be good at your job, of course, but there's the rest of the world that keeps moving because you were trained what to know, not how to think and how to be curious. So you got to change that as well. Last thing, I've come to learn that in a free society, you cannot legislate behavior in a progressive direction unless doing so can benefit you financially. Okay? True. So, oh, you don't want to integrate the lunch counter at Woolworths?

39:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:we're not going to go to Woolworths. Okay. Okay. That affects your bottom line. In order to make the change, I could not have convinced you just by conversation. I had to hit your pocketbook. And I hit your pocketbook. Oh, the lunch counters are now open, are now integrated back as they needed to be in the 1950s and early 60s at F.W. Woolworth lunch counters. They each had a luncheonette within the buying floor. of the store. And that's why they are all out of business now. Because they integrated. They integrated. They had DEI lunch counters. All right, Neil. We'll step up. Wait, we're almost done.

40:11Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay. So consider when whaling was a big business. Okay? We're going back into the early 1800s, let's say. All right. Whaling. Why did we hunt whales? Because they had it coming. That's why. Get your big ass out of my ocean. Exactly. Taking up all this ocean space for yourself. We were harvesting blubber. It's blubber. Yeah. Exactly. The blubber that keeps the whales warm, insulates them, because whales are warm-blooded, was a fuel source. It's a great oil. Oil for our lamps, everything. Clean whale blubber.

40:59Big, beautiful, clean whale blubber.

41:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:Burn, baby, burn, the whale blubber. So you could have started a movement back then, as some did, to save the whales. These big, beautiful creatures, and we're just slaughtering them for their fat. I mean, come on now. That didn't work until what happened? Alternative fuel source. We discovered oil in the ground. That was safer and cheaper to process and use. Then the whole industry shifted. All right. And so I'm not going to expect you to just say to people in a free country that they need to behave in a progressive or green way. So I would tell the people, getting back to the question, I would tell people in the pipeline, in the educational pipeline, be inventive, economically inventive about how you can create solutions to problems that are not just emotional, philosophical, or even scientific, that are also economic.

42:13Neil deGrasse Tyson:Because when you make an economic solution to something, it flies because everybody wants a piece of that. And that's just being practical here. Let me then throw in the chatbots because I can get the chatbot to do my homework. I can get the chatbot to write a paper. So are we going to see students not necessarily being in higher education in a bricks and mortar campus? They've got their chatbots and they do their learning there. or is that taking them out of the knowledge? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So here's the problem. Here's the problem. Okay? Yep. So let's go back to when, because I'm old enough to remember when the four-function calculator dropped in price from$200 to$30.

43:03Okay?

43:03Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wow. That happened relatively quickly, like within like a year and a half or two years. Over that time, the big question was, should we allow calculators in the classroom? And the answer was yes, because there's some things you're learning that were not as important as other things. And some of them is just drudgery work. Okay. Like long division. Yep. Does anyone know how to do long division anymore? Like, when are you going to be somewhere where you need to do long division and you won't have access to a calculator. That's not going to, you're not going to be in caveman and you got to start a fire.

43:40Neil deGrasse Tyson:Well, I need long division and no one taught me. That fire didn't start because you didn't carry the two. What? What? The hell is your dumbass problem? Now we're all going to freeze to death. Because it didn't carry the two. So there's a place for that. And before calculators, we had slide rules. Were slide rules cheating? No, it was just another way to get to an answer. But you had to know your steps to get to the answer because garbage in equals garbage out. So here's the problem with the chat bots, chat GPT, et cetera. It is revealing to us that the school system values grades more than students value learning.

44:30Neil deGrasse Tyson:And as long as that is true, everyone at all times will cheat on all exams to get a grade. But if the system instead were who is learning, nobody would use the chat box. Only just to help themselves to learn more rather than as a substitute for their own ability to write or to know because they themselves would want to learn. Because the curiosity would be built in. And so until the day that happens, then teachers need to give oral exams. So we need a higher student-to-teach-year ratio to make that happen. I grew up in public school, 32, 34 kids per class. Private schools are, what, between 10 and 15?

45:15Neil deGrasse Tyson:15 tops. Yeah, tops. So that's the kind of ratio you need to give everyone an oral exam. Yeah. And they get two teacher's assistants, by the way. Right, right, right, right. It's like you have the teacher and then you have like Miss Betty and you have, you know, Miss Judy that helped the teacher. And there's only 13 kids in the damn class. So those are my three bits of advice there. Okay. Four, when you include my comment about using AI to do your term paper. I say if you really want to learn Chinese. and careful where you go learn Chinese and get ready to work for them cause

46:06Neil deGrasse Tyson:just saying I time for only a couple more questions so what you got now this is Frank's burning question and he's our editor Frank and Frank says help me I am on fire

46:27Neil deGrasse Tyson:do you know if he smokes cigarettes i don't know if he smokes he better otherwise your imitations don't work that's right okay he says hey frank here i might be editing this video right now oh it looks to me like this office is a vault to the universe talking about your office. Could you grab your very favorite item and describe it to us ASMR style? Wow. Look at that. But there's so many. I mean, there's so much crap in your office. Oh, my gosh. Jesus Christ. I swear to God, it looks like Sanford and Son went to the universe. Oh, Sanford and Son. I don't know. I don't know. The cosmic Sanford and Son.

47:20that means you're calling all my stuff junk well it's not junk that's for sure but i mean some of it is junk but okay it all has it all has sentimental and uh personal value some of it has actual monetary value too some of it is i don't want to put it out there but some of that stuff in there don't thank god there's security because you know some of the stuff is is money

47:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:Let's make it something simple. Let's keep it simple, okay? Okay. Right here. Hang on. Okay. Oh, ASMR style.

47:53So, many years ago, the Planetary Society caught notice of me.

48:00Neil deGrasse Tyson:They, co-founded by Carl Sagan, have a mission to promote the public's understanding and appreciation of space exploration. especially that of the planets. I was invited to join the board of the Planetary Society. That's when I met Bill Nye. He was a member of the board. That's where I met Ann Truyan. Ann is the widow of Carl Sagan who founded the Planetary Society. Well, after a couple of years of that, the idea came up should Ann Druyan who owns the rights to Cosmos resurrect the series she mentioned it I said I'd be delighted to help I have modern insights to get a next version she said have you thought about being host and I said no I don't want to be a TV star she said but you may be able to do this uniquely in the memory of Carl.

49:13Neil deGrasse Tyson:So I said, okay. So I agreed to do Cosmos. Then, who was going to fund it? We went to PBS, and they said, we want to put in our own writers. And we said, no, we got writers. No. And so it didn't land on PBS. No, it didn't. Then, Seth MacFarlane took interest in this, because he's a science geek you will know if you watch any episode of the of family guy he's had like the whole cast of star trek and he's got time machines and weather machines and okay so seth mcfarland says why not take it to fox to fox and we took it to fox and fox said we'll bankroll the whole thing and we said okay what kind of control are you asking for and they He said, we don't really know how to make documentaries, so just do whatever you want to do.

50:12Neil deGrasse Tyson:He was like, oh my God. So while that's happening, Fox acquires National Geographic. This gives Fox a world distribution for Cosmos to show up on TVs in 40 other countries in ways that would not have happened had it just been Fox or definitely had it only been PBS. So I create a relationship with National Geographic. Then Cosmos ends. And National Geographic says, Neil, is there anything else we could do together? And I said, well, I got this podcast called StarTalk. And they said, let's put that on TV. And I said, whoa. You mean like a talk show on TV? They said, yeah. So we put StarTalk as the very first late night television science-based talk show.

51:22Neil deGrasse Tyson:And it was nominated for Emmy four times. Four times. Now, why am I saying all this? Because right here in my hand is a StarTalk mug created by National Geographic. It's a huge beer mug. I think it holds a pint. It's a beer mug that has StarTalk on it and National Geographic that could have only come about because it went to Fox after Fox acquired National Geographic, which could have only come about because Seth MacFarlane's work for Fox, which could have only come about because I became host of Cosmos because I was on the board of the Planetary Society. That is this keepsake right here. This is not a metal stein.

52:17Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's a glass mug. Gary, I think it holds a full pint. That's what you guys do in the UK, right? That's right, yeah. Might even be called a tankard. Oh. So this stares at me on the shelf every day, packed with decades of memories that are the origin of its existence. There it is. Like I told you, Frank, some of this stuff is junk. What you said? Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha!

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56:43Neil deGrasse Tyson:Hi, guys. What are the burning questions? How's my ointment doing on burning questions? Are you sitting comfortably? then i shall begin uh right dr tyson how do you personally position yourself in relation to who's this from sorry this is from xiao one of our editors and one of our editors excellent yeah how do you personally position yourself in relation to religion would you describe yourself as an atheist or agnostic or something else and depending on that position how do you approach the question of death? Even if one is not religious, do you consider it possible that something metaphysical might exist beyond the physical universe?

57:22Or does science suggest that death is simply the cessation of existence? What happens to the complex thoughts, memories and emotions a person developed through their life, throughout their life? I ask this from the perspective of someone who was strongly atheistic and scientifically minded, now facing an incurable illness my father is suffering and trying to convince myself that perhaps there is something beyond in light of this situation how would you approach the question yourself or what would be the best intellectually honest way to even consider from a scientific standpoint the possibility that something metaphysical might exist that's a long question but i think it's uh it's an interesting one yeah well xiao thanks for bringing us down i know scott damn jow

58:11Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay, a couple of things. I recently learned that Stephen Colbert, who is himself religious, he's a devout Catholic. Yes, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That he calls people who say that they're agnostic as having no balls. He's an atheist without balls, okay? Gotcha. I would say he's an atheist without gonads because they're afraid to commit one way or another. I disagree with that. I think a lot of agnostic people did believe in God and then realized there's not a lot there to hold on to, but they still want to hold on to it. He just wants you to commit. Yeah, he wants you to go one way or the other. Gotcha.

58:58Neil deGrasse Tyson:So I'm a different kind of agnostic based on what I've seen and what I've read. I call myself an agnostic only because the definitions of words are how people use them. Unlike what we normally think of as a dictionary defining a word, a dictionary describes a word as it has come into use. Okay? So, if you look at leading atheists of the day, Richard Dawkins, who's been on the show several times, You look at Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, now deceased. These are leading atheists who each had atheistic books that they've written. Right. And you look at their behavior. There's a lot of their behavior that does not overlap with my behavior.

59:48Neil deGrasse Tyson:For example, I will defend the use of AD and BC in reckoning years. for BC is before Christ, AD is Anno Domini, Latin in the year of our Lord. I will defend the use of that because the Catholic Church put the Jesuit priest on the case to figure out how to fix the calendar that was broken. And out of that came the Gregorian calendar, which all the civilized world uses. So I give props to where it's due. whereas ardent atheists strip that from the calendar reckoning and use CE, common error, and BCE, before the common error. Who are they fooling? It's the same timeframe. That's stupid. This is a cleansing of the communication channels just to put distance between them and anything religious.

1:00:46Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's not me. My single favorite Broadway musical is Jesus Christ Superstar. My single favorite choral work is Bach's Mass in B minor with Handel's Messiah a distant second, but it's still second. Okay? How dare you? Handel's Messiah was actually written in English. Yes. Yeah. Was it the King James Bible? But it was... Anyhow, I am not ardent against people who have strong or even mild religious faith. Not up in their face debating them this. Whereas all these other folks I just listed have debated devout religious people in their lives. That's not me. Therefore, I don't want to say I'm an atheist if by saying so you think I'm going to be like that.

1:01:43Neil deGrasse Tyson:I need some other word that's softer than that because I personally am softer than that. And my best evidence for this was I had a friend of mine go up on the space shuttle, and on my Facebook page, I said, Godspeed, my friend's name, and STS, I forgot which, you know, STS is how they numbered the space shuttle missions. And I said, Godspeed, space shuttle. People in the comment thread said, Godspeed, I thought you were an atheist. complaining that I used that word. How dare you use that? Exactly. These were atheists trying to claim me. You have blasphemed no one. Damn it, you've blasphemed nothing.

1:02:35This is so frustrating.

1:02:37Neil deGrasse Tyson:You heretic of no idea. Right. So that was very telling to me, that there's certain behavioral characteristics that are expected. And to the extent that I do not fulfill that, I will not count myself among the ranks of atheist. Because it's the behavior of the leading atheist that are defining people's understanding of the word today. Yeah. That's why I'm agnostic, okay? The only reason why. Otherwise, there'd be no question here, okay? All right. Now, how do I deal with death? As I get older, I'm thinking more and more about that. Mm-hmm. And the last chapter of my book, Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization.

1:03:26Neil deGrasse Tyson:You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to read you those last two paragraphs. Okay. And then that'll give you all the wisdom and insight you need to take to your father, speaking directly to Zhao. So I've thought long and hard about death. And yeah, I'd lean towards the scientific sense of death, where your state of non-existence in death is not fundamentally different from your state of non-existence before you were born. Think about that. Before you were born, you weren't saying, where am I? How come I'm not anywhere? You just had no existence. and my confidence in a non-existence in death comes from people who've had many strokes and with many strokes, different parts of your intellectual functioning go away bit by bit.

1:04:32Neil deGrasse Tyson:Your ability to recognize other people, to know where you are, to remember to eat, to speak, do you have short-term memory, long-term memory? and these are neurosynaptic failures of the brain. So in death, where there is no neurosynaptic activity at all, to require of death that somehow your brain is restored into some newly functioning whole, for me as a scientist, is unrealistic. But that doesn't alter other thoughts that I have. For example, we are made not figuratively but literally of stardust. We are of the stars. We are the same ingredients the stars are made of. Our ingredients came from the stars.

1:05:22Neil deGrasse Tyson:So it's not just that we are alive in the universe. The universe is alive within us. and that's a gift of 20th century astrophysics to civilization that borders on the spiritual okay so now in death you've got pretty much two choices in modern society you can be buried that's my choice so that the energy content of my body which is still there when you die you have no neurosynaptic thoughts but your molecules were built up from your lifetime of of eating and exercising and, and, and the building of your organs and your muscles and other tissue in death, those molecules still contain energy. If I'm buried and I decompose, all that energy gets absorbed by microbes, by flora and fauna dining upon my body the way I have dined upon flora and fauna my whole life.

1:06:24In that way, giving back to the earth what I had

1:06:29Neil deGrasse Tyson:taken or literally borrowed over my life. If you're cremated, the energy content of those molecules, it doesn't go away. It gets transferred to heat. This is what heats the air column over the crematorium. That then radiates infrared energy that was once the energy content of the molecules of your body, radiates it out into space, moving at the speed of light. So, after someone has been cremated, you can keep a timeline. Where has their radiant energy reached by now? If they died four years ago, if they were cremated four years ago, they would have reached the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.

1:07:19Neil deGrasse Tyson:20 years ago, you can look at a map and see where that has touched. So that in a way, you're still a part of the universe. You're still in the universe, just in a different form. In order to presume you are fully alive and functioning, that requires religion, which is strongly based on belief systems rather than on anything science would tell you about it. I'd like to end Zhao with a reading from the last several paragraphs of a book I published a couple of years ago, Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. I'll be reading from the last chapter titled Life and Death. Do you know, do you really know how precious life is?

1:08:09Neil deGrasse Tyson:The total number of people who have ever been born is about 100 billion. Yet the genetic code that generates viable versions of us is capable of at least 10 to the 30th variations. That astronomically huge number is a one followed by 30 zeros, producing a million, trillion, trillion possible souls. Each of us, for all practical purposes, is unique in the universe, now and forever. Being alive is the time to celebrate being alive, every waking moment. Along the way, why not strive to make a world a better place today than yesterday, simply for the privilege of having lived in it? On my deathbed, I'd be sad to miss the clever inventions and discoveries that arise from our collective human ingenuity, presuming the systems that foster such advances remain intact.

1:09:14Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's what fueled the exponential growth of science and technology in my lifetime. I further wonder whether civilization's arc of social progress will continue with all its fits and starts, and thus reward any time traveler from the oppressed spectrum of humanity who choose to visit the future rather than the past. On the whole, I don't fear death. Instead, I fear a life where I could have accomplished more. An epitaph worthy of a tombstone comes from the 19th century educator, Horace Mann. I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

1:10:03Neil deGrasse Tyson:Our primal urge to keep looking up is surely greater than our primal urge to keep killing one another. If so, then human curiosity and wonder, the twin chariots of cosmic discovery, will ensure that starry messages continue to arrive. These insights compel us for our short time on Earth to become better shepherds of our own civilization. Yes, life is better than death, but life is also better than having never been born. Each of us is alive against stupendous odds. We won the lottery only once. We get to invoke our faculties of reason to figure out how the world works. But we also get to smell the flowers.

1:10:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:We get to bask in divine sunsets and sunrises. and gaze deeply into the night skies they cradle. We get to live and ultimately die in this glorious universe.

1:11:14Neil deGrasse Tyson:Zhao, your father needs you now. He, whatever are his ailments, he's not alone in people whose lives have been hit by disease, ailments, accidents, war. Pestilence. Regardless, we are the lucky ones because we got to be born at all. So I spent a lot of time wondering if I had never been born. You have to be born in order to then die. So the birth is a privilege and so is the death. Because that's the package of life that we're handed. And everybody else in that 10th to the 30th variations of the human genome will never know either end of that celebration of this universe. And that is a cosmic perspective.

1:12:12Neil deGrasse Tyson:Gary, Chuck, I love these, hearing from all the folks. And I'm sure they love hearing from you. Who are in the StarTalk family. Yeah. Yeah. A pretty cool group. our fan base gets to see that our people got curiosity too right yeah they're not alone and that a lot of there's a lot of people behind the scenes making the star talk happen yeah right exactly all right i think that's a wrap gary yes call it a day thanks for now no pleasure neil always a pleasure all that and chuck we love you especially in that that that a comedy special oh you mean just smart enough that you can actually watch on the star talk main channel Oh, that?

1:12:53That one? That comedy special?

1:12:56Neil deGrasse Tyson:I forgot all about that, but now that you mention it, yeah. This has been another installment of StarTalk Special Edition. This is the burning questions from the StarTalk family of producers and editors coming in. And I'm delighted in that. I like being the ointment for the burning sensation that all of you feel. apply twice a day as good as good as new by tomorrow all right until we meet again as always keep looking

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1:14:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:The wrongs we must right. The fights we must win. The future we must secure together for our nation. This is what's in front of us. This determines what's next for all of us. We are Marines. We were made for this.