So that was a different special edition, Gary? Yes, it was. But I appreciate the curiosity that the two of you have maintained strongly into adulthood. I know, we couldn't sit on it any longer. We had to share. Coming up, Chuck and Gary's burning questions. I believe there's an ointment for that for me on Star Talk Special Edition. Welcome to Star Talk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
start off, begin right now.
This is Star Talk, special edition, which means I got with me Gary O'Reilly, Gary. Hi, Neil. All right. Chuck, always good and heavy, man. Always a pleasure. So be here. You guys invented this variant. Can I use that word these days with viruses? Yeah, I was going to say, wow. Turn this into a viral infection. We invented this variant of special edition, where you guys, apparently, I didn't know this, over the years,
have collected questions that have tapped roots in previous shows that you want to bring back to me. Yeah, so the things we get involved in, which is such a variety, as much as it's informational, educational and fascinating, you kind of always seem to come out of one with
Oh, what if we ask that? Oh, okay. So it's, you know, so we're trying to scratch this itch. Okay. To a certain extent. Now you've mentioned variant, I'm now scratching an itch. Yeah, there you go. Okay. All right. Now I don't know if I'll have the answers, but I'll try. Okay. Well, please stop looking at me like this. Please do. You know, listen, you won't have an answer. An answer. Oh, that's what's good. All right. So there will be an answer. Okay, who's first? Go.
Which direction do you see human evolution taking in the future? Do we stay biological? Head to a trans-human existence, or do we go totally post-biological and just become the super-intelligent AI? I think we will resist. Just an opinion. Of course. I think we will resist merging
technology with our biology. Neurologically, I think we will, there's a lot of spoken about this. Oh, that's so disappointed. Yeah. I think we'll resist it. I think you're right. Because they say, let's put the whole internet on your frontal lobe. And people are like, I have the internet in the palm of my hand without the surgery required to open up my brain and stick it there. So I'll take the 10 seconds to find the information I need rather than the instant information that would otherwise be the case. And I want the chip. I have evidence of this.
What? Okay. We're old enough. He's not old enough, but you and I are old enough to watch planes get ever faster over the decades. Yes. From the Wright brothers up through the 50s. You did not see the Wright brothers. I remember the Wright brothers. I'll tell you, I'll remember that day on Kitty Hawk. Never thought they'd get it off the ground.
They said to myself, those boys are wasting their time. They need to go back to build a boss. Was it all fields? So what I'm saying is, you can ask the question, why did we want planes to go faster and faster? Because we're impatient. We're impatient and we want to reduce the time you're in transit between we or our and where you're going. Then there's a point where planes just didn't get faster.
In fact, they're going a little slower today than they were in the early 1970s. It's not uncommon to cross the Atlantic at 500, 550 miles an hour. My day, it was like 600 miles an hour, 650. So what's going on? Do you really need it to get there an hour faster? When you have a thousand movies you can watch, you have access to the internet, you can sleep, you can be applied with alcohol and food,
Do you really need to get there fast? My point is, you're not getting any of that on Spirit Airlines. What's the matter? I don't know what you said is happening on Spirit Airlines, sir. So I'm saying, in that case, the speed, which sounded like a good idea when you're otherwise wasting your time on an airplane, getting from A to B, the moment you were no longer wasting your time, in fact, you were being productive, the urge to fly supersonic
evaporated. And so I'm saying, I have access to the internet. You want me to have one second access to the internet or instant rather than 10 seconds. I don't know that I'm going to go there if I got to sit under a scalpel and you poke into my brain. So I think we will resist that. That's my opinion. I think you're right, but I still want the chip because first of all, there, you can barely see them and they can take the four of them and put them together and just slide it in and unless Elon's doing it, then I don't want it.
I do not want it if Elon is doing it. I don't want Elon's chip. I'll give you access to the internet. But here's the reason why I want the chip. And I don't mean for me personally. I mean for a friend. For mankind. For all mankind. There are certain responses that we have that are neurochemical. There are certain things that we possess that are detrimental to who we are as a species.
And the wiring of our brain, the wiring of our brain that come out of evolution. Yeah, so go in, fix the wiring, but get your ass back out of my head. But my thing is that only the chip could actually do that on an ongoing basis. It doesn't have to be ongoing if you know exactly where the bad wiring is, fix the wiring, and get the hell out of my head.
So if I have a phobia, or what's the one where you keep doing something repeatedly? Obsessive, compulsive. A phobia? One day, perhaps, neuroscientists will know exactly where that spot is in the head. Go in there, nip tuck, snip tap, reattach, bata bing, we're good. You no longer have a phobia, and you no longer have a compulsion.
So that's what I'm saying. I think we will resist that. That's all. So you're talking about improving mental health. What if we now get to the stage where we can improve our biology and start to live that much longer and then all of a sudden you've become totally post-biological and you'll live for eternity? Sir, we will figure out how to manipulate the biology so that it does not age, but you're still biological.
But do you have that transhuman part where you have to have the chips and the bits and pieces and the upgrades? Why would you need that if we can fix your brain? That's what I'm saying. But does the brain control every single aspect? No, okay. There are people with artificial hips and knees and shoulders, you know, head shoulders, knees and toes. That's why I say I don't see the difference.
I think we will resist that. Next question, Chuck, is it your turn? Okay, here we go. If an unobstructed photon is traveling towards the edge of the universe, but the universe is simultaneously expanding, which it is, and redshifting increases the photon's wavelength, okay? At some point, because from what I understand, the increase in the wavelength
actually reduces the energy of the photon. At some point does the photon just disappear if it just keeps going and going and going and going? It redshifts to infinity.
So that happens at the horizon of the universe. So if we have a horizon where at that place, all the objects are receding at the speed of light. So when the photon catches up with that, at that point, it has redshifted to infinity. And it's got nothing for you. It's got nothing for you. Wow. So that's the end. It retests to infinity.
That's so unsatisfying! Now you sound like that photo. So as part of the sort of start or group think that we had, Alex Bicardis came up with... Alex, one of our producers. Yes, one of our production team. If you could bend the laws of physics to your will, what would you change if anything?
Ooh, okay. So in graduate school, there's a calculation you do where you look at the gravitational constant, which was first proposed by Isaac Newton, but it would take centuries later to measure its value reliably. What is the gravitational constant? It's the thing that's in the gravity equation that tells you how to calculate
how much gravitational force you get from how much mass. So the force is proportional to the mass. How do you turn that into an equation? You have what's called a proportionality constant, the gravitational constant. You don't know this, but you've been invoking that ever since you recited the equation, e equals mc squared.
All that equation says is energy is proportional to mass. How do you turn that into an equation? You need a proportionality constant. That's the c squared, the speed of light squared. So all of these understandings of how the universe works, we have something on one side of the equation, there's a constant there. Constant of proportionality, you make the measurement. So one of the calculations we do is we take the gravitational constant and say, what happens if we change it?
by a little bit. What are the consequences to the universe? It turns out that you run the gravitational constant through your equations of a star. And if you change the gravitational constant by a little bit, increase it by a little bit. It has stupendous consequences on the luminosity of stars. The luminosity of a star is dependent on the seventh power
of the value of the gravitational constant. So if I double the value of the gravitational constant was two to the seventh power, okay? Two times two is four, eight, 16, 32, 64, 128. The luminosity of stars would grow by a factor of 256, thereby reducing their life expectancy. All the universe would be much brighter, but they would burn their energy faster,
and they wouldn't last long enough for planets around them to evolve into complex life, it would be devastating. That's a lesson to us all. If you wanna mess with the universe, you gotta be prepared for the consequences. F around and find out.
Now, that being said, there's a book series called Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland, written by a physicist George Gamo, the mid-20th century physicist, Brilliant. Brilliant guy. He first calculated that after the Big Bang, you would have a cosmic microwave background, okay? Very important calculation. Anyhow,
he would say he would for the public so he's it after my own heart here uh... mister tomkins in wonderland and each of these books mister tomkins was in a world where one of the constants of nature was different
So one of them is the speed of light is 60 miles an hour. Oh, wow. So he's driving down the street. In the dark. And he seized phenomenon that you would see only if you went very fast near the speed of light, like in a normal situation. But the speed of light is not 60 miles an hour. A very creative. It's beautiful. Yeah. And another. So one would be kind of cool is, you know, there's something called dispersion.
And it's diffraction, dispersion, refraction is what light does as it goes through a hole in the wall or goes around a corner or goes into another medium. If you change the value of Planck's constant, that's the constant for quantum physics. There's a value you can make it so that if you walk through a doorway, you will diffract.
it'll affect you macroscopically in the way it previously only affected particles. And so I thought it'd be fun to dial that up just so I can live in the world of quantum physics just for a day. Now that'd be cool. That's what I'm saying. That's all those rules are different. Yeah, that's a completely. So I would do that just as an amusement park, not as a thing. I'm not messing with the laws of the universe otherwise. That's good news. Yeah, good. Thank you.
Hello, I'm Alexander Harvey and I support Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.
So our producer asked that question. Yes. Okay. And here's another producer, Lane. Lane. We've learned on the show that your position on human evolution is that it was contingent on the extension of dinosaurs. Is our civilization contingent on the formation of hydrocarbons over millions of years? Did the progression of human energy sources require that we utilize fossil fuels? Could we have gone from wood fire straight to electricity? I think about that all the time. Yeah.
I think about, could we have landed on the moon in the year 1700? For example. Why not? So one of our other producers, Lindsay, and I co-wrote a book called To Infinity and Beyond, where we tracked what people were thinking
in their day, and how far away was whatever dream they had, technologically, intellectually, scientifically. In the year 1700s, I want to go to the moon. How would you do that? You don't even have a periodic table of elements yet. How do you do that? Will the material science allow it? Does physics develop? Do you have enough astronomy knowledge? Do you even know what the moon is? So, I think about that all the time. Did everything have to happen in the way it did?
because many other factors have to come together. Many other discoveries matter at the same time. So one cannot just run off by itself. No. And they all build upon each other. They all build on each other. They're sliding doors.
scenario where everything has to happen or at that moment if you're going through it. See, that's what I don't agree with that. I agree that they are definitely platformed where they build on top of each other and they have to be made so that that can be done. But I think it's a matter of human beings have progressed and regressed and progressed and regressed. And if we had just progressed
I think we might have got to the moon long before the 1700s. Well, you know, because when you think about it, we built the pyramids, you know, I mean, or at least aliens built pyramids. You know, we had civilizations, great civilizations, but then we always have war and that slams us back to a place before we started. So we take one step forward and three steps back. Or does it?
Let me read for you. Uh oh, here we go. He's got his phone out. Let me read for you. Go ahead. A passage written by Christian Huygens. Huygens Dutch polymath. Okay. Okay. He discovered what Saturn's rings were. Oh, cool. Before him, they were just like...
Blobs of light. So this is a ring system. It's rotating. Exactly. He's done a lot of brilliant things. I'll read to you from his book, Cosmotheros. Cosmotheros. 1898. Oh, okay. The vices of men are no hindrance.
to there being the glory of the planet they inhabit. And it deeply really, all the scientists back then were religious. Okay, so it's folded in here, but watch how he says it. Besides, the vices of men themselves are of excellent use. These are the vices that you said regress us. Are they not? Excellent use and are not permitted and allowed in the world without wise design.
For since it has so pleased God to order the earth and everything in it as we see it is, for it's nonsense to say it happened against his will or knowledge, we must not think that those different opinions and that various multiplicity of minds were placed in different men to no end or purpose, but that this mixture of bad men with good
and the consequence of such a mixture as misfortunes, wars, afflictions, poverty, and the like were given to us for this very good end for exercising our wits and sharpening our inventions by forcing us to provide for our own necessary defense against our enemies. Saturn notwithstanding, that guy's an idiot.
That's what goes on. I'm sure he does. Poverty, what role that plays. He's taken kind of a fatalistic view. It's a bit more like, his thing is kind of like, you know, we're here because we're meant to be. And I don't know. He's right in a lot of ways here, especially since I wrote a whole book on this, okay? Accessory to war.
the unspoken alliance of astrophysics in the military. What's going on when we're at war? Innovation happens. Always. I don't want to die. Always. I don't want to die gene. And I'm cool with that. And well, it's just, I'm just saying your book is smarter than that guy because self-preservation will always outstrip anything. And he's saying,
He's saying that you would only need self-preservation when you have a-holes trying to not preserve you. When a-holes try to kill you, you kick in high gear. You kick in high gear. So, if we go from burning wood, I don't see us going to the moon without a whole middle piece there where our capacity to generate energy gets greater and greater and greater. And there's a lot written about consumption of energy in the historical record where
People say, oh, America's used so much energy per capita, and we have to reduce that.
However, again, I'm just observing this, I'm not value judging it. The history of the world, the greatest civilizations, the ones that were most powerful, however you measure that, were the ones that consumed the greatest amount of energy per capita. The most energy per capita. Yeah, you can't rule the world unless you're using up a bunch of energy. You figure out how to use the energy. Exactly. Be it human capital, chemical energy, whatever. So I think we needed ways to develop enough energy in the system
to create elements of society that are high consumers of energy, like our transportation system. Think about that. Airplanes, rockets. You don't have that unless you command energy. And you're absolutely right. My only caveat, I will say, because I do not disagree with anything you just said. I don't necessarily disagree with Huyvin-Flyvin, but...
But my caveat is that if our chief goal were one of enlightenment, we would constantly be seeking a higher level with or without the threat.
destruction, the threat of war. We would be training ourselves, and this is part of who we are as human beings, we'd be training ourselves to constantly want to advance. Except, I think the urge to be enlightened is not as strong as the urge to not die.
Absolutely, I agree with that. So my point is, if we cult, if that were our chief goal was to cultivate that, we would be able to burge in that. The species would have to rethink itself. Right. And that's my point. That's such a bad thing because were we to chase enlightenment to innovate rather than create a thousand year war? Wouldn't that serve humanity better?
Also, when you think about war, think about this. War is very rarely a large swath of a population saying, let's go do this. It's normally a few people making the decision that a bunch of other people are gonna go and fight and die. You're convincing you that they should do that. Exactly. That's part of the problem here. He just goes on here and says,
for that natural knowledge, which was the product of laborious industry, and which makes us that we cannot but admire the power and wisdom of the Creator, and he's going back to the Creator, putting the bad people and the bad things around us, okay? Which otherwise we might have passed by with the same indifference as beasts. And if men were to lead their whole lives in an undisturbed, continued peace,
in no fear of poverty, no danger of war. I don't doubt they would live little better than the than brutes.
without all knowledge or enjoyment of these advantages that made our lives pass on with pleasure and profit. I disagree with that. Yeah, he's saying we'll be, we're complacent because we have it all. That's basically, if it weren't, if it weren't for A-holes, he's messing things up. God put A-holes on her, so everyone else can make life better. Basically, God gives you lemons, make lemonade.
Yes. And that's the best invention of God there ever was, lemonade. Right. So why would you discuss? Give me another question. All right. Why would we discuss energies? Yes. Data centers, AI plus Bitcoin mining.
energy consumption. It's huge. I mean, this is not just a single nation. This is a global phenomenon. So how are they going to be powered in the future? Is the answer nuclear? Is it solar? Is it wind? Is it burn more wood, burn more gas, burn more oil? There's no shortage of energy.
I know, but these guys, they can't keep burning up energy like a small nation. I want to be clear. There are some who walk among us who want to demonize the consumption of energy. And I'm saying, fine, on the assumption that the energy you're demonizing, that the production or utility of that energy somehow badly affects the environment.
but solar power, wind power, hydroelectric, there's no shortage of other ways to generate as much energy as you want. You drive through the Southwest of the United States, the Sahara, any desert, there are no solar panels there. There's just sand. There's not even plants. There's just sand that gets hot and re-radiates the sun's energy at night, not serving anybody at all.
I'm saying, if you're gonna need energy to mine Bitcoin or whatever else you, there are ways to produce energy that doesn't mess up the environment. And I don't care how much energy it is, because we're getting more energy than we'll ever use, coming down every second from the sun. And believe it or not, there's energy beneath us. That'll do us drill a hole down and you can actually pull energy from the earth itself. Just in Iceland, they have tubes on the mountainside that go down into the lava, into the very hot layers beneath the crust.
They cycle water down there. It gets hot. And they send the water down into town. They actually have to cool down the water before it gets to your shower because you get scalded. But we're going to produce massive data centers.
I don't care. I'm going to need energy. Fine. And we have it. I mean, Neil's saying we have all the energy that we need. Correct. And I've been saying this for years. I don't care what anybody says. Okay. Or just use nukes. The sun itself is enough energy for any and everything we need. I don't care what anybody has told you. Just because we haven't made the necessary strides to harness that power doesn't mean that that power is not available. In order to mean that we shouldn't think of using things that invoke a lot of it. I don't have a problem.
Yeah, exactly. No issues. And this is what I was saying. And if you couldn't nukes, you would want to use fusion, not fission. Fission has byproducts you have to expose that. But on their newer ones coming out, sort of like modular, smaller. The direction we want to take down the future is fusion, where there's no unpleasant byproducts. Yeah, that would be good. Yeah, it's just turning hydrogen into helium. That's all that happens there. Anyway, Chuck, next. Okay, here we go. In wave particle duality,
We know that photons can kick out electrons, showing that they are both particles, right? We also know that the double split experiment shows that electrons create wave interference that interferes with itself, so it's a wave, okay? So electrons are waves and particles just like photons.
But anybody who's ever used a battery knows how we use electrons for anything as a particle. How do we use electrons as a wave? Is there anything we do that says we take the wave part of the electron and we use that instead of the particle or as a particle?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. All right. So let me take a back door into your question. Okay. All right. So imagine a wave. Right. Like it has an up and a drop in the crest. We call that a sinusoid, but it's up and down from a sine wave. All right. I had a sinusoid infection month. It was terrible. All right. So that's a wave.
So if you're using the light that has this wavelength and you want to take a photo of anything that has detail that's smaller than that wavelength, you ain't getting it. Right. Okay. Yes. That light of this wavelength cannot resolve any detail smaller than its own wavelength. Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. Okay. So how do electron microscopes work?
Aha. Okay. Well, let's look at wavelengths. We get in order of reducing wavelengths, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Let's make the wavelength smaller than we get what? On the other side of violet. Indigo. No x-rays, right? Or gamma or something? Other side of violet. It's beyond violet.
Ultraviolet. Sorry. Who's co-host? Sorry. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Ultraviolet. Okay. What comes after ultraviolet? X-rays. Okay. Really small wavelengths. Okay. Okay. More energy, smaller wavelength.
Yes, not only is it higher energy, smaller wavelength, but if you use that light to take photos, you can see things in that tiny. So what you do is you heat up electrons until their wave equivalent is
X-rays. Oh, snap. And then you beam the electrons to the... And then you can take pictures of the stuff. Is that that way? My hair's on the edges of insects. So that's why they call it an electron microscope. That's why. Because the wave particle duality is being exploited for that technology. Yes.
So I didn't realize so that you, you heat up the electrons. It was a way to do it. You'll cite them to the point where they get to that wavelength. Yes, that's their wavelength. There it is. They have the energy level where that their corresponding energy is x-rays. You beam it in. Who the hell thought that's brilliant in science.
That's amazing! That's why any electron microscope you've ever seen in any book, that's some detailed stuff. You've seen it. Like bugs and cell fibers and things. I know, aren't they? And that doesn't work with visible light. The wavelength is too large. That's great. Okay, well there you go. That's an example. Oh, that's a great example.
Ready for the next one. Next one. Okay, so. These are good questions. You're doing our best. The reason we haven't encountered alien life forms now is maybe that these alien life forms are billions and billions of years old and have gone from a biological to an artificial intelligence and are living for eternity and therefore we can't see touch feel. Is that likely as a possibility?
Why wouldn't you be able to see Tetra feel something just because it lives for eternity? No, no. If it's gone to an artificial intelligence and exists in a virtual capacity, if I'm thinking it correctly. So using our feeble 21st century vocabulary, you're saying it might exist in some computer state, some memory state, and it's just happy existing on its own planet. Forever.
So it's living in its own matrix. Where it wants to go to the beach, it goes to the beach. What's that movie? Total Recall. Everybody's just living there and they're just machines humming. By the way, that was a recurring theme.
in the Netflix series Black Mirror. I love consciousnesses have been uploaded into just this bank of computer. It was the British guy that was behind all of that. Oh, forget his name. Oh, heavens above. Anyway, moving on. He's brilliant.
So I'm just wondering, you know, if a civilization, a race, an alien life form has been in existence over billions and billions of years, surely it's evolved into something absolutely superior. They've learned to ditch their biology and pick on it. So we could visit a planet where it's just these humming data centers. And that's where millions of people are living out their lives, such as in the matrix. Okay. That's plausible. Okay. All right.
I'll keep an eye out for humming data centers. But I wonder how would it ever make a discovery?
Yeah, at that point. I'm saying, because I still get to go to the beach and pour over the shells and rocks. And I might discover a life form that my consciousness in the box will never know, see, or even think. Well, if they're really super intelligent, they'll have probably worked a way out. I don't know how that would be if they're not the ones doing the discovery. But we're doing 21st century thinking and they're doing billions and billions of years. They'd have to have some version of itself that's still exploring out there. So then we might see their hardware emissary.
Interesting, because that's most likely what we'll do once we leave first. And by the way, why wouldn't they want to leave and go to? Because if you're not bound by the corporeal, then you can now get into a ship bound by the corporeal. I know I heard that and I liked it. I keep bound by the corporeal. Well done, sir. Well done. Well played. You can get into a ship and still be tethered to your planet there.
still be on the ship too and then say let's go uh both places let's go both places let's go to a black hole let's see what the event horizon is and you're still let's fall into and you're still black on the front let's fall into this black hole that part of you dies but right that part is right okay i like this this good yeah i mean that's if i could put myself into a contest that's what i would that's the only reason i would want to keep living if they didn't have
probes that went beyond their planet, they would be ossified in the moment that they stopped doing that. This is what I would claim. See, that sounds like hell to me. Did you imagine being stuck in 2024 for eternity? Well, if you go far enough back when civilization didn't change very much, you'd live your whole life with no expectation of living differently tomorrow than you did today. Damn, wow. Whereas today,
Everybody expects tomorrow is going to be different. That's true. Okay, so back then, for their concern, all eternity would be like that. Doesn't everybody think tomorrow is going to be worse? You know what? That makes a lot of sense why people want to go to heaven.
Because if your life changes very little, you need some escape from that. And it's like, okay. If life is changing daily, you got something to look forward to. Even the mystery is something to look forward to. You want the pot of gold. Yes, exactly. Wow. As Patton Oswell says, they want sky cake.
I'm sorry, it's the best description of heaven I've ever heard. I don't care about my life down here. When I die, I'm giving God cake. I've heard that routine. Hilarious. Hilarious. I'm sorry. Anyway, let's go to Alex P. Here we go. You said that there is a time when we will achieve exit velocity from death.
How does the notion of human immortality gel with the concept of entropy? Ooh, look at that. Do the laws of thermodynamics forbid humans from ever living forever? Yes, you would never live forever if you were a closed system.
entropy would take its toll. But life on earth is not a closed system. No, it isn't. It is open to energy sources beyond itself. It's called the sun. It's called the sun. It's that simple. This is one of the early attempts to out argue the physics by fundamentalist creationists. They would say, well, you say things always decay to disorder by the second law of thermodynamics and look at us. We are more complex than ever before.
And it's just, you should pause before you try to argue physics with a physicist. If your foundational knowledge is from a book written 4,000 years ago, you just have to pause for a moment. Okay, the entropy issue takes place only in closed systems, okay? We have a three species sphere downstairs living in a vat of water that is completely sealed.
We have kelp, we have krill, and we have snails. And they have been living off each other for 25 years. Since January 1st, 2000, as 25 years ago, we've had, they've been kicking it downstairs, okay? One of them eats the poop of the other, they're dead, they're dead, okay. Tell us symbiosis. Okay? So, yes, they're symbiotically entangled. Entangled, no watch. When the construction was happening?
The construction folks, this looks pretty important and fragile. Let's protect it. And they put a tarp over it!
That's great. Oh, and so we caught it early, but, you know, there were a couple of belly up, Creole. Of course. But basically they thought that this was its own thing, its own world. It kind of looks that way because it's a sealed sphere.
All right, it's not its own world. It requires energy from the outside, just as we do here on Earth. So if you want to live forever, you will do so at the expense of some energy somewhere else on your planet or in the solar system. Cool. If you want to live forever, don't let anyone put a top of you. That's the lesson of the crazy guy. Yes, it may be, don't let him do that in any case. That's great.
One more question, time for one. All right. Science fiction sometimes has stories of humans interacting with aliens and trying to find a universal commonality from mathematics or the laws of physics to bridge the inevitable communication gap that will arise between two massively different cultures. Are there any good examples of this you haven't heard in fiction or any that you were impressed by the authors that they came up with? This question from Brian.
Yes, I have an example. Brian, our IT specialist. Our IT guy. Okay. And I got this. All right. Very good. Forgive me for not remembering on the spot who came up with this, but it was not a science fiction author. It was like a philosopher, a physicist, a mathematician. Sure. Okay. So he said, here's what you do. You want to communicate with aliens and you want them to know that we are smart. Okay. You just make a triangle. Okay.
as big as you can on earth. Okay? Then you make a square off of each side of the triangle. All right. Okay. And the triangle has side A, B, C. These are really crappy squares there, okay? We're not judging. There you have it. Now you make channels here with like fuel or something, and ignite it when earth is at night.
Alien will see this and say we got some smart people down there. Do you know why? Okay. What is the area of a square? Well, it depends on the size of the square. No, no, a square of side C. What's the area? It's I'm trying to remember my stupid. Well, the area of a rectangle is what?
It's, oh God. It's height times the width. That's right. It's a square. That's what we say, side one, side two. Side, side, side two. So in a square, it's, so this C with the same as there. So the area of this square is C times C. C times C. C squared. C squared. You got that? Okay. What's the area of this? Oh my God. A squared plus B squared equals C squared. What's the area of this square? What's the area of the square? That's A squared. A squared. Okay.
A squared in the area of this one. That's B squared. If you draw this, it means you know about the Pythagorean theorem. There you go. So that the squares of the sides of a triangle are not just an abstract concept. They're actual squares. That's crazy. You'd like this on fire at night. The aliens will know you've been hanging out with Pythagoras. Only if the aliens studied geometry.
Oh my God. When would it be funny if we got some dumb ass aliens? I told you it was going to come in handy at some point. You said math didn't make a difference after school. So I'm saying we all learned the Pythagorean theorem just by looking at a triangle and we're told that A squared plus B squared equals C squared. But if they were aliens they'd just look at that and maybe if they were cone heads they'd like the idea that it was a triangle.
That as well. Or maybe they like Doritos. There you go. Okay, so as a kid, the first science museum I ever attended was the Boston Museum of Science. And then a lot of hands-on exhibits as good science museums will. Cool. And they had this on the wall. Oh. And you know what it was? So you would rotate it. So it would be sitting there like this, and there'd be this flat squares against the wall, and this had liquid in it.
Just a thin square volume, okay? It's had liquid in it. Oh, that's brilliant. And so when you turn it, you turn it, this liquid fills the other two squares, and this then filled completely these other two squares. That's great. A squared plus B squared equals B squared. That's really cool, man.
That's a great exhibit. That's some good cheese. Yeah. That's some brilliant educators thinking about it. That's very good. And so I was just duly reminded by our producer, Alex P, that Gauss, brilliant German mathematician, obviously, proposed this as a way to possibly to show aliens that we're not still living in the caves. Yeah, because it's so intentional. That's amazing. Yes.
Yeah. And so simply. And so simple. And that's what the genius is. That's why you're not going to say you're not going to write an English sentence or even some other symbols might throw people off. We can throw out best equation, but they might have other symbols for equation. Like a difference. Where's a triangle or a square? They get it. We got it. Wow. Look at that. OK. All right. That's your answer, Brian. This has been Chuck and Gary's burning questions. Start talk special edition. Thank you. I enjoy that. We should do that more. Yeah, that was fun.
Maybe you can ask us some next time. Maybe, yeah, I will. The answers will be interesting. All right, we're done here. Start talk special edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Thanks, Chuck. Gary. You're welcome. Gary Chuck. And same thing. Until next time, keep looking up.
