Things You Thought You Knew – Zombie Apocalypse

0:00Coming up on StarTalk, it's another Things You Thought You Knew episode. all about asteroid fields, the analemma, and the zombie apocalypse. Check it out. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Jack. Yes. Hey, man. So, you know, there's this latest StarTalk book. We spend a large part of a chapter exploring how empty space actually is. Yeah. You can get a sense it's empty because there's these big, vast voids and things. All right. But I don't think people really feel how emotionally empty. Oh, really? They came out wrong.

0:55No, that came out wrong. I was going to say, space is just sitting around just like, I just don't get it. I put myself out there. I mean, I'm friendly. I don't get it. You know, I want to connect with people. I want to. I just, I don't understand why I just can't seem to make that kind of tight fit with anybody. I don't. It's tough being space. God. But it just seems like no matter how much comes into me, I just still feel so empty. I mean, new stars are happening all the time, but still, it just doesn't do it. What do I have to do to have some sense of accomplishment or fulfilledness in my life?

1:51I don't. I'm sorry, Space. I'm sorry, Space. Our time is up. Maybe we can pick this up next week.

2:02who would ever think to personify space okay that's not even a thing right all right so so so let's take a look we have eight planets and they go out you know four or five billion miles but there's only eight of them right so clearly that that's pretty empty right yeah yeah okay That's pretty empty. Okay, let's keep going. But you know there are these asteroids. Right. And most of them are collected in this flattened zone between Mars and Jupiter. Right. Okay? Because it's a flattened zone, we call it a belt. The asteroid belt. Asteroid belt. Okay? There are comets that come into the sun from all directions.

2:53Right. And if you projected where they come from, it's a spherical region around the solar system. And we wouldn't call that a belt because it's a spherical region. We call that a cloud. A cloud, right. The Oort cloud. The Oort cloud, Jan Oort, who's a Dutch astronomer. So he saw how many comets were coming in from every direction. and comets are moving fast when they're near the sun. All right. And when they go farther away from the sun, they move slower and slower and slower. So when he did the, when he ran the math on the, before computers, by the way, he ran the math, he concluded there must be billions of these comets way out there in these long loop orbits that come around.

3:37Right. And they'll spend most of their time far away from the sun because that's when they're moving the slowest. Right. Right. Pluto is the most significant member of the Kuiper belt of comets. Right. So that's a belt because it's a flattened region around the sun. All right. 1801, the first asteroid is discovered. And people are excited because they think it's a planet. Right. They discover it orbiting in this big gap, suspiciously big gap between Mars and Jupiter. People are saying, let's just keep looking. There's got to be something there. It's a bigger gap than you think should be there given the distances between other planets.

4:18Between the other planets. Exactly. So they found Ceres. We found a planet. And then they found another one. And then they found another one. And another one. The first four asteroids, Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, and Juno. Ceres is the root. Ceres is the goddess of harvest. And that's the root to the word cereal. Okay. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Okay. So anyhow, once we started discovering many, many, many more of these, we realized, wait a minute, they're all in the same swath of real estate. They don't sort of own their own space. And actually, they're really tiny. Right. They're so tiny through a telescope, they look like a star.

5:00Stars are so far away, you can't see any size for them. These are right here with us. They're right here with us. So they look like stars, but they're not stars. Right. They're asteroids. Oh. You get that? Little stars. Yeah. Oi. Oi. Star-like. Star-like. Star-like. Okay? So, well, how many are there? Well, we started counting hundreds initially, then thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands. Right now, we're up over a million known asteroids with orbits and existence in our solar system. Right. And one of them has my name on it. No. You didn't know that? I did not. You did not know that?

5:46I'm serious. I did not. Okay. We've been together a long time. How did I not? You have your own asteroid? Yes, I do. Yes, I do. I'm sorry. Okay. I don't mean to brag or anything. By the way, there are a lot of asteroids. So there's a limit to how big your head can get when you get an asteroid named after you. Just saying. I don't know about that. That's not bad. I mean, I wouldn't mind. I mean, can you see it? Now, that's the thing. Well, I double-checked that it's not headed towards Earth, or it's not on an Earth-crossing orbit. You don't want to be that asteroid. You don't want to be that asteroid.

6:20Yeah, it's just like, Neil Tyson is coming to kill you all.

6:25So it's asteroid 13123 Tyson. 13123 Tyson. Yeah, that's what it is. That's cool, man. Okay, so I have an name. Now, wait a minute. Just very quickly. What? Can anybody get their own asteroid? I mean, or is that something where, like, somebody bestowed this honor upon you? It's not one of those things where it's just like one of these services where it's just like, you too can name a star.

6:55Give it to your girlfriend for Valentine's Day. Name a star. You use the salesman voice, right? Name a star. so um the person who discovers the asteroid right has the power to name it after any person place or thing oh so that's cool so somebody found this asteroid that you know and they were just like hey neil i'm gonna name this asteroid wow that i'm gonna say so that's that's an honor it's that's more than an honor that's like that's like naming a child after somebody okay okay i mean honestly that asteroid is gonna be there long after we're all going your kid's gonna die that's That's true.

7:32That's true. If you named your kid after me, it'd be like, okay, that's an honor for like, what, 70 years, three, four, and 10? All right? It's not like your kid's going to live forever. You know, I was named after Chuck Nice. No, but that asteroid will be there for generations to come. That's a serious honor. There it is. Okay. So that's one of the asteroids in the asteroid belt. Okay. We know of a million. There's probably as many as a billion. Depends on how small you want to count. What's going to count? Right. All right. So now watch. That swath of real estate is so large. Okay. Let's ask the question.

8:14What is the average distance between asteroids? Okay. That's a very honest question to ask. That's a honest question. Now, if you base it on movies, all right? That average distance would be around six and a half feet. That's right, because you're navigating. You've got to navigate the spaceship to make it look cool. It doesn't look cool otherwise, right? And the rocks are banging off the side of the ship and jostling the ship. Right. And even in Star Trek, Captain, we're entering an asteroid field. Right. There they go. And so, yeah, this is cinematic trope. What's going on as you enter an asteroid field?

8:58Okay. I got a feeling right now. I got a feeling that you are about to ruin another cinematic constant or tradition. Another cinematic tradition is about to bite the dust, courtesy of Neil deGrasse Tyson. Why do you got to bill it like that? I just know. Why do you got to make me look? Why you do that? Something telling me, man. Okay. The average distance between asteroids in the asteroid belt is about 600 ,000 miles. Oh, my God.

9:43So basically you're like, okay, so you can't see it. But over there to the left, if we're not careful, in about a month, we might hit that asteroid. Imagine showing that. Showing that in the movie, right? That's the movie. That's the new movie version. Okay? Captain, we've entered the asteroid belt. Oh, my God. What is the potential damage, number one? I don't know how to say this, Captain, but we can't see any of them. They're too far away. How shall we maneuver the ship? There's no need to. I'm actually going to go take a nap now, Captain. I'm going to go lay down because that's how much danger an asteroid belt actually poses.

10:35you know so so what's interesting is our first space we have four well five well more than that i'm old enough to remember the first four spaceship to go beyond mars in the solar system to reach the outer planets so if you want to go to the outer planets you have to cross the asteroid belt Right. Okay? We did this calculation, all right? Early on. Pioneer 10 and 11, twin spacecraft, first to have enough energy to leave the solar system, but they're not as famous as Voyager 1 and 2. Right. All four of those spacecraft went through the asteroid belt and nothing happened to them. And if it did, NASA would have been the laughingstock of all spacecraft, of a space program's effort.

11:28Because there's 600 ,000, how could you hit something? You can't, if you tried to hit something, you couldn't hit it. You gotta try. It's like when my dad took me to learn how to drive in the parking lot of the supermarket and the supermarket is closed and I hit a lamppost. No, you didn't. What? What? How could you? There's nothing here but lines on the ground and this one lamppost and you hit it. How did you hit the lamppost? Okay. So, yeah, I'm just trying to get real here. I mean, so that's all I'm saying. Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah. That's terrible. So that's why we don't worry about crossing the asteroid belt.

12:23We just send stuff through. It's not even a thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, honestly. Oh, my God. And once again, I can say once again, Star Wars has it completely wrong when it comes to the science of space. thank you star wars for your con your assiduous consistency where you just get it wrong every time so anyway that was a long lead up to that one little bitty fact there i learned that i have an asteroid i have an asteroid name that was so much fun but actually and that's the cool the coolest thing well actually those are two cool things we learned one you are never getting hit by an asteroid in the asteroid belt that's number one number one And number two, Tyson, 321?

13:11No. It's 13123 Tyson. 13123 Tyson. Which means at the time that was named for me, there was in the tens of thousands of named asteroids. Got you. Okay. But now we're like in the high hundreds of thousands getting named. And so there's asteroids named after, like I said, people, places, and things. If you discover enough asteroids, you can name one after your pet. Right, yeah. There you go. So there's an asteroid somewhere named Fluffy. Fluffy 3-1-1-2-3. There's an asteroid named Santa. That was kind of cool. The Santa world. And I have a friend of mine who was at a telescope Christmas Day, and he made sure to observe Asteroid Santa on Christmas Day.

13:58Oh, man. Just for the grins of it, yeah. That's a cool thing to know, though.

14:12Hello, I'm Alexander Harvey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

14:29How long is a day? Depends. Are my kids with me? Because then it's too long. but 24 hours is what they say. 24 hours. Yeah. It's 24 hours. We could repeat that every day without, okay, that's fine. But suppose you were to use the sun to keep track of that. How about the time it takes the sun to get to its highest point in the sky each day? That ought to be 24 hours. Cause every day the sun rises and it gets a highest point sky and then it goes and it sets on the other side. All right. Right. Yeah. That ought to be 24 hours. Right. But it's not. Exactly. Damn daylight savings time. No, no. There are some days where the sun is early at its highest point in the sky relative to your clock.

15:27And sometimes it's late in the sky. You're thinking it would cross the highest point in the sky at high noon, right? High noon. That's what they say. Sometimes it gets to high noon before noon comes. And sometimes it gets to high noon after noon comes. Sometimes the sun is fast and sometimes the sun is slow. Now, of course, we're the ones in motion around the sun. So I shouldn't be sun centering those sentences. Right. But just for now, that's what I'll do. And it could be by up to 15 minutes. Oh. Too fast or too slow relative to your 24-hour day. That's correct. Cool. All right. What that means is you can't really use the sun to tell you when noon is because the sun will be ahead of that or behind it.

16:13So if you're okay, plus or minus 15 minutes, sure. Use the sun. Sun is on CP time. CP time. Don't go there. It's the sun. The sun is like, what you talking about? 15 minutes. That's it. We're still good. We're still on time. We're still good. We're still on time. 15 minutes. Yeah. You really mad about 15? Come on, man.

16:41Are you going to tell people what CP time is? Oh, I don't want to, but I'm going to have to. But yeah, CP time. Okay, how about this? No, don't do it. Just make people go to the Urban Dictionary. Yeah, go to the Urban Dictionary and look up CP time. If you drew the shadow, the tip shadow of a stick in the ground, every day at 12 noon, the tip of that shadow will trace out a figure eight on the ground over the 365 days of the year. There'll be four days where the sun hits 12 noon at the highest point in its arc. All the other days of the year, it's either before or after. That's the width of the eight.

17:22Tells you how much before and how much after 12 noon the sun arrives at that point on the sky. Now, this sounds really obscure, doesn't it? But every single sundial ever made has a figure eight on it. I was going to say, it sounds obscure now because we don't use the sun to tell time. But if you actually use the sun to tell time and you don't want to end up on CP sun time,

17:49So you would use the figure eight to adjust the fact for the fact that the sun was either slow or fast so that you'd get the proper time accurate to in about a minute or two. Actually, I've done this experiment. You get it to within a minute. A properly oriented sundial, when corrected by this figure eight, that figure eight is called an analemma. That is the name of that figure eight. And so you might ask, how come the sun is not behaving? How come the sun's not behaving? Thank you, Chuck. Because they got nothing to do with the sun. It has to do with the fact that Earth's orbit around the sun is not a perfect circle.

18:31When we are closer to the sun, we are moving faster in our orbit. If we move faster in orbit than when we're farthest from the sun, we have to turn a little bit extra to complete the sun's journey from noon to noon because we moved in our orbit around the sun. So if we turn to exactly the right same direction, we're not going to see the sun anymore. We have to keep turning to compensate for that. And so these effects are not only because we're in motion around the sun, but because sometimes we're traveling faster and sometimes we're traveling slower. Those conspire to make a figure eight. And that figure eight is called an anilemma.

19:13If you have old cartographic maps of the world, like old globes, look in the South Pacific where they put the legend for distance and the compass rose and things. In there you'll find an anilemma, typically. Now that is something I'm going to be honest, had no, never heard of before until just now that it never, just completely new. But it makes perfect sense. And it's very important because, of course, if you want to keep time. And by the way, so let's go back to a perfectly circular orbit, which we don't have. You would get this adjustment anyway, okay? So it takes 23 hours and 56 minutes for the Earth to rotate once on its axis.

19:5956 minutes and four seconds to rotate once. Well, how come we said 24-hour clock? Because in that time, we orbited the Earth and we have to turn four minutes extra to then see the sun back where it's supposed to be. So we say Earth rotates once in 24 hours. That is false. That has never been true. Earth faces the sun every 24 hours, turns back to the sun with an aligned spot every 24 hours. And that has to be adjusted because sometimes we move faster in our orbit and sometimes we move slower. All of that's going on. That's correct. And you just wake up, have breakfast, go to work and come home.

20:37There you go. Now you can have a true appreciation for your digital clock, people.

20:44Yes. Yes. And by the way, most ancient peoples knew about this. Because what else are you doing? They didn't have HBO, you know, Max at night. What else are you going to do at night? You're going to look up. Right. My God. Do they ever play anything else on this channel? God. On the Sky Channel. The Sky Channel. By the way, December 21st in the Northern Hemisphere, first day of winter. Okay. The arc that the sun takes across the sky is very low. In fact, it is the lowest arc of all arcs of every other day of the year. Okay. December 22nd, the path is a little higher in the sky. And this continues to June 21st, where the arc that the sun takes across the sky is at its highest.

21:37Okay. Right? This is part of the reason, like the primary reason, why it's warmer in the summer and colder in the winter. The sun is not very high and is not up for very long. The ancients were very concerned about this. The ancient pagan cultures, very concerned about this. Because the sun is everything. It gives you warmth and your crops and your agriculture. So there's the sun getting a lower and lower arc in the sky. So around December 21st, it stops getting lower. The sun stops. Solstice. Yes. Sol is the sun. Stice is stopped. Armistice. You stop the arms. So it doesn't stop in the sky. The trajectory, the daily trajectory across the sky doesn't get lower.

22:24But then they weren't sure of this. It took a couple of days to make sure. And when you can say, hey, it's on its way back up again, that happened a few days later. Right. Guess what day that happened on? Probably around, I don't know, the Christmas, you know, nice Christmas. So huge celebrations. Yay! So now Christianity says, we don't want you worshiping pagan gods. We want you worshiping Jesus. That's right. And so there was a swap of, there was an adjustment of where are you going to put the birth of Jesus? Passages in the Bible, taken literally for what they say, would put it in the spring.

23:06Right. Not in December. But if you want to get as many converts as you can, you can't take away their holiday. That's because pagans know how to party. Pagans party, baby. You can't stop the pagan party. You can't stop the pagan party. No, they've got the bonfire and everything. They're drinking. It's amazing. And they're like coming along like, no. Hey, guys, by the way, you can't worship this anymore. And there's this guy, Jesus. You're going to have to kind of worship him. Well, does he drink? Well, not really. I mean, he can change water into wine, but he's not a big drinker. We don't want him.

23:42That's good. That's a start. That's a start. That's a start. Yeah. Tell you what. Tell you what. Here's a compromise. How about you guys keep your party and we'll just celebrate him as a part of the party? We're good with that. Start the fire. There it was. That's it. So that's basically the entire reason for the birth of Jesus and Christmas being December 25th. Yep. Because that's when you assure the sun's arc returns in the sky. So all of this is going on in the 24-hour day in the calendar and the 365 days of the year. That's all. That's awesome. Here's your analemma for you. Analemma, baby.

24:22Analemma did right by you in the end, I think.

24:44Chuck, you don't have to look too deep into the news to find all kinds of ways that we're all going to die. Oh, yes. It's why I like the news. You know, when I get depressed, I just turn it on and, you know, sit back and bathe in apocalyptic, you know, grandeur. Yes. It's wonderful. You know, there's the asteroid. There's a killer virus. There's AI. Yep. And the list goes on and on. And people like stay up nights thinking about ways we're all going to die. And the one that is treated the most lightly, however, is one that I think should be given a little more serious attention. Okay. And that's the zombie apocalypse.

25:37Okay, I'm going to ride with you for a second. I'm going to ride with you for a second. Okay? Yeah. What? I mean, all right. Okay. You don't think I got this? Listen, hey, here's the deal. I've doubted you in the past. and it has worked out. So I'm going to give you a little more leeway right now. But I got to tell you, this twig is very thin. I don't know if it can support all this weight. Okay. So the zombie apocalypse is, all right, the way it's typically shown in a movie is there's some virus that affects a person and they bite you and then you're affected by that virus. But that virus manifests by killing you.