Neil deGrasse Tyson - Are We Alone On Earth? The Truth About Aliens, UFOs, and Life on Mars | #118

probability that there is life of any type on Mars today where do you put that today that's a little harder we've seen hearings in Congress a number of hearings about UFOs all of a sudden we're thinking that the Pentagon has special access to aliens I'm just thinking if we were being invaded by aliens we would not require Congressional hearings to establish that fact is Earth life actually Martian life yeah it's crazy as that idea sounds it's completely [Music] plausible hi everybody Peter dmis here welcome to moonshots today is a special episode of WTF just happened

in Tech with the one and only Neil degrass Tyson uh extraordinary author scientist and just provocator across all things in Tech so Neil and I can talk about what's going on in the space world what's going on in SpaceX and origin are you a musk fan a Bezos fan will we go to Mars should we be going to Mars you know will Humanity actually make it beyond the Earth unless a government or military presence pushes us there Neil and I disagree a little bit on this I'm going to be showing a series of slides if

you're listening on audio you'll hear me referring to the slides uh that are coming up we'll be discussing again to the recent news pieces if you're watching this on YouTube You'll see the slides we're going to be speaking about AI we'll be talking about humanoid robotics again Neil and I disagree I think humanoid Robotics are critically important are going to be you know growing into the billions Neil's not sure why we would have humanoid robotics anyway join me for a fascinating conversation with a brilliant man Neil degrass Tyson all right let's jump in everybody Welcome

to moonshots and a special episode of WTF just happened in technology this week I have a a friend a dear friend I wouldn't say an old friend cuz that sort of uh implies that you're old but chronologically we did meet some 30 40 years ago Neil degrass Tyson Neil good to see you yeah thanks for having me about time you have me on your show I I tell you I'm call you don't write you know I'm here for you I appreciate it buddy uh I would love to talk about some of the recent advances in

space and AI over the last uh couple of weeks that are are pretty uh I would say Stellar but you know that's are amazing just by the way it's not obvious to me given how knee you are in all of these subjects that I would be able to offer any insights to you at all that you couldn't offer yourself just I want to start the conversation that way well uh I have great faith that you have uh uh great wisdom and experience in all things space and many things if not all AI so uh you

know a lot of drama this past last month on the whole uh Boeing versus SpaceX um I if you following this so you know here's the situation about uh I don't know uh what was it here a decade ago NASA's retiring the space shuttle and they want to put up uh humans in the future and so they give out two contracts one to steadfast Boeing and want to upstart SpaceX and this week uh the upstart is saving uh the steadfast Boeing any any thoughts on this yeah I I never have strong opinions about what Hardware

ever gets used to go in and come back from space uh by the way I don't view it as the upstart beats the time I don't think about it that way I think about it is you know you're in the future when if one vehicle can't bring you back you roll out another one okay why isn't anyone celebrating that fact uh and and we know these two astronauts names Sita Williams and is is it Butch uh uh you know sita's gotten all of the publicity it's always about bringing her back I I nobody cares about

um is it Butch Wilmore I forgot his first name butore so Williams and Wilmore all right they we know their names well many of us knew them just because we knew them they they're veteran astronauts but other people now know their names for the first time because of this fact that they've been stranded and consider that that's evidence once again that we're living in the future of space exploration because no one can remember the names of anybody in space whereas when I was growing up you knew everybody who went into space and the and the

TV programs were interrupted to show you those launches that's because they were unusual they were rare they were the first ever of any time we are reaching for the skies it is so routine today that that of course we didn't know who was up there now we know and now Boeing's not working so we throw up SpaceX they'll come back and they're veteran astronauts the fact that the Press was using the word stranded meanwhile there's a half dozen other astronauts on the space station okay how how stranded can you be when there are other human

beings there ready to hang out with until you get res plus there's plenty of food plenty of water and there are people who you know well who pay top dollar just to get into space so if if I were them if I were Sita and but I'd say oh I have to spend longer in space oh that's too bad isn't it guess let me just enjoy the rest of this time so that's how I look at it you know it's interesting when do you think the next names that we will memorize and learn in school

will have happen is it the first people back on the moon the first to Mars or we just pass it'll be the first to Mars for sure yeah for sure and by the way when we land people on Mars you'll have to rename your podcast off to Mars shots yeah moonshots will be oh that's not even a big project anymore so yeah so that's that those are my views there and I I I think NASA is pretty calm about it it was the press that I I think we the idea that one can be stranded

in space carries a lot of clickbait with it I'm old enough to remember in 1969 there was a movie marooned remember I was young at the time but I remember we were landing on the moon and here's this fictional story of astronauts stranded in space they could not come back out of orbit I don't remember why but they could not come back out of orbit it had Jean Hackman was in it uh Greg peek was in it and big actors of the day and of a generation anyhow they couldn't come back and we had a

rescue rocket to come rescue them however a hurricane was coming over Florida and I'm young enough to say well how often do hurricanes happen because I'm growing up in New York City then I realize yes that's a real thing that happens in Florida so they couldn't launch otherwise everybody dies and someone realized this was brilliant brilliant storytelling someone noticed that that the eye of the hurricane was going to pass over Cape Canaveral and I and I said well why does that make a difference cuz then I'm learning climate at the time oh my gosh the

eye of the hurricane is calm and peaceful relative to everything else that eye came over the Launchpad they launched the rocket up rescued the mission and it was a happy ending that's being stranded okay not chilling with six other astronauts on something that by the way you know how much area they have in the module you take a cross-sectional area I mean obviously they live in the volume but the area is like 400 square ft and there are studio apartments in Manhattan smaller than that that people live in their whole lives so yeah I had

no sympathy for them and I'm pretty sure they're happy to spend more time in space they are in fact speaking of people going up privately on the Launchpad right now is the Polaris Dawn Mission so uh this is a friend uh Jared man who made his uh his money uh in the financial Tech world and is funding private missions of the space station this one's interesting because it's going to be going to a polar orbit and to new altitudes never seen since the Apollo days um excited about this any thoughts on just a few things

maybe it's not obvious to people that there's a reason why launches uh with great effort launches are are made as close to the earth's equator as you can uh in fact there was a a sea launch company that would launch your satellite from the exact equator because they would just move their boat to the equator and then launch it there but think about where we launch in the United States it's not in Maine it's not in Alaska it's in Florida and Florida is closer to the Equator than most any place else in the continental United

States the the reason for that of course is as Earth rotates the equator is moving faster than any other latitude it's going about 1,000 M hour so that's an easy number to remember because the circumference of the earth is about 25,000 mil and we rotate once in 24 hours you divide the two you get about 1,000 mes an hour if you're anywhere else you're traveling less fast well if you launch East something into orbit you need less fuel because you're already going a miles an hour and so if you need less fuel you have more

payload so nearly all things ever launched in the history of the Space Program were launched near the equator D East if you going to launch in any other kind of orbit it takes way more fuel to accomplish this and what's cool about polar orbits however which is many spy satellites have those orbits because you get to spy over Russia it goes over the pole and then you you spy and then it comes back over you and to give you the data see that's very convenient spy trajectories but what's interesting about polar orbits which is very

common when we visit planets is if you go into Polar orbit the planet rotates inside of your orbit so that you can paint photographic paths over the entire planetary surface and log a full map of what's going on uh so uh so these are good and and you're sell seats to it I I'd want to fly over the North Pole and see check out Santa the only the only challenge is uh the radiation belts right are not giving us as much protection over the poles and because it's a higher orbit you know I'm thinking about

you know half my life these days Neil is in the longevity business and uh I have grown up passionate about going to space my only concern is getting too much Cosmic radiation uh and too a dose if I spend any significant time up there what what elevation will they be going their their orbit is going to Peak at 700 km altitude which is significant yeah yeah yeah yeah that's that's uh what factor two or so above the space station and that makes them more susceptible to high energy particles from space deep space as well as

from the Sun you know we take it for granted we're in the at the base of this ocean of atmosphere are protecting us not only from asteroids okay otherwise we'd look like the surface of the Moon but of course the high energy particles deflect around Earth's magnetic field and they were protected by the by that as well so if you're going to go up higher than that you're at risk now I don't know how long they're going to spend in orbit do you remember how long I don't it uh the trip has been delayed Now

by a week because of the downrange recovery uh location but I think it will be uh on the order of 5 days thereabouts which isn't too bad yeah and so I mean think about it the the radiation that we're speaking of does not require all that much to to be shielded so for example a thin layer of water yes will do that and I imagine sort of long space flights you would have your entire water supply forming just under the skin of the of your vessel right and the water just gets cycled in and out

of there any good engineer would be able to design this and there are other metals that it doesn't get through so there are ways to protect yourself and five days of this I I don't know if that's good or bad like you said uh you're worried but we do know that very very low doses of radiation can be um promote longevity within you as your DNA gets mildly damaged it get then gets repair aired better than it was before at very low levels and so so yeah maybe they can just sign up for the medical

experiments we can find out whether the rest of us should take that trip you know what I'm excited about more than anything in the space business and I'm curious what you are is the upcoming flights of Starship right Starship is the Koga wagon it's the uh it's the first trans Atlantic like K stoga wack come on dude it's a rocket give it give it a little more give it a little more it's the uh it's the Connie for transatlantic flights uh what what you call it I try to go the Pony Express okay I I

let me res the ra the railroads the railroads okay when I first learned that Europe was pulling together their resources into a brand of airplane and they were going to call it the Airbus like no no don't no no how dare you okay and if you look at the A380 yeah that's a big old fat bus it's just it's just a we are Cargo in those airplanes and so I just maybe we're just we're done with fancy words and we're just trying to move move the population all right well it's called Starship for the moment

and uh it's not going to the Stars it's really a planet ship it is it's a moon ship and space is is is riddled with all manner of exaggeration that way okay NASA says they're going into space and they're going 200 miles above Earth's surface which is like one it's like one centimeter above a school room Globe but not to an astrophysicist excuse me so there's a lot of this exaggeration going on uh I I pulled this clip uh from one other thing is there still a Miss Universe contest because if there is she's really

miss Earth okay you should be clear about this okay stop the exaggerations out there all right I pulled this clip uh from I'll call it Twitter for the moment even though it's it's a clip by Elon and uh let me play this I I found this compelling take a look see super crazy but the more you talk about it the I mean I think uh you know at at SpaceX we specialize in turning in converting things from impossible to late [Laughter] so but it's it's pretty nutty cuz you're going to have this gigantic you know

booster coming back um and uh I mean that's 9 m in diameter not counting the chines or roughly 30 ft in diameter um and uh it'll weigh about 250 tons put on the heavy side we'll make that ladder of a time so that's the mechanism by which the Starship booster comes back it lands with these giant mechanical arms being captured by the by the original Launchpad so it could be refueled and sent back later that day yeah that's audacious if every time you flew a 747 to London and they had to roll it off a

cliff and bring out a new one that trip would be really expensive okay so so what Elon is pioneering is not what is impossible in space exploration he's pioneering what was unrealistic in terms of price and just cost so the engineering is getting a workover but consider that he hasn't done anything that NASA hasn't already done the the actual space Frontier is still held by NASA right and so and it remains to be shown if his um his new Ventures have commercial support commercial value because if they don't then it's a one-off and it it's

a spectacle but it'll just uh it'll go what'll happen it'll you know we all applaud it but then he goes on to his other projects well I'll I'll differ with you on on that I think I think honestly you know the space shuttle was an attempt for reusability and you remember this when it was a first when it was first proposed to Congress the space shuttle I think had a perlight cost of $50 million and was supposed to fly 50 times a year yeah yeah a we and it ended up at a price tag of

$4 billion a year independent on how many flights it flew because it was a Workforce initiative right so four flights a year was a billion dollars each one flight year was $4 billion a flight and uh very you know while it reused the shuttle itself the tank and the boosters were effectively you know the tank was was thrown away and and the boosters were refurbished which was extraordinary expensive so I think what what SpaceX has done is is shown actual reusability of the Falcon 9 these are engineering Frontiers that have been breached here you're markets

are there no no no no I'm just want I just want to make it clear that when people say oh now Elon is leading Us in space no he's not he is making everything we used to do cheaper okay so those are engineering technological improvements on what had been done by government spending with with tax money basically all right and to the extent to which he carries NASA product including humans into space it's once again tax money but spent by commercial Enterprise rather than by NASA so so I'm I'm so you I don't know where

you were differing with me I agree with you it's way more efficient and the shuttle never lived up to its hopes and expectations but the shuttle nonetheless went in and out of in and out of orbit just like everything Elon has launched it's gone in and out of orbit so people when you hear the people dream of a space Frontier is where have you gone lately how far from Earth have you sent so let's let's let's talk about that so they SpaceX just announced its uh its first ship to Mars is going to be called

Heart of Gold okay nice poetic but this is the conversation I wanted to have with you Neil it's the what should we be you know where should we be going what should our vision be so you know you and I are have been in this industry long enough to know there were sort of two different schools of thought on one side and I think Bezos and musk differ on this um you know Mar Elon was let's go to Mars directly I think the contracts at Nasa uh for going to the moon has swayed him to

go to the Moon first and then to Mars Jeff uh actually is much more in the school of thought I am which came from the days of Gerard O'Neal at Princeton which is let's go to the Moon uh let's get resources there and let's not go back into a gravitational well let's not dive back into something we have to use a lot of energy to get out of and instead let's build large scale O'Neal colonies um uh and you know basically large rotating kilometer long uh cylinders where you live on the inside of the cylinder

and build Society there I'm curious you know where you come out in this should we go to Mars and colonize that or should we use asteroidal materials and lunar materials to build habitats for large populations so it reminds me of a lot of commentary that I published actually in uh one of my books several books ago called space Chronicles facing the ultimate Frontier just a side note that was not the original title I submitted it with the title Failure to Launch the dreams and delusions of space enthusiasts because that's really what the book is about

and the publisher said no you can't have the word failure and a title and delusion no no we have to and so we tidy up the title all right but in it is a Frank assessment of the mismatch between everybody's dreams about where we would or should be in space and what actually happens if you go back to the 1960s we're walking on the moon early' 70s all the commentary was we're walking on the moon now we will have colonies on Mars by the mid1 1980s I remember I remember the reports that came out and

it was like it was it was like if we keep if we spend at the Apollo level we'll have this amazing even if we cut it back by half we'll still be on Mars in the 80s yeah that but that if statement was yes that's literally true if you kept that spending but it is it was tonee of geopolitics and space does not exist in a vacuum yes it does actually sorry you you be you beat me to it bad analogy there okay space spending does not exist independent of the geopolitics that drives it so

there's everyone thinking that we went to the moon because we're Americans and we're explorers and it's in our DNA and it's the next thing to do and therefore Mars follows no Mars does not follow excuse me no that is not how any of this works it's not how it has ever worked we got to the Moon looked over our shoulder the ruskies aren't there and we say we're done here we're not going back to the Moon stranding Apollo 18 and and further missions yeah we had we had actually built the Rockets Apollo said stranding Apollo

18 all those Rockets were built but but the budget gets cut is it because we lack the political will no it's because the geopolitical forces no longer stoked it and so that's why we have not left low earth orbit in 52 years it's not because of the absence of political will it's because it's an absence of a perceived enemy so let's let's fast forward what happened I'm on a presidential commission under W to assess how we're going to transition NASA from the space shuttle into some future program and we say let's phase out space shuttle

money phase in a return to the Moon let's do that okay and we had it all laid out and then move on to Mars it was called the Moon Moon the Moon what's it uh Moon Mars initiative I remember it well no yeah I know but the commission well is the commission on the future of the US space exploration policy but that was shortened to the Moon the Moon and Mars commission that's what it got shortened to anyhow we advised Congress of this and then they costed it out and it would cost like a trillion

dollars to send by the way a trillion dollars spent the same money for NASA every year over 30 years gets you basically a trillion dollars so so so the num sounded heavy and impossible to reach even though it was plainly laid out in front of us so it languished plus the the bush haters said send Bush to Mars okay fine so then who replaces Bush we have Obama okay Obama does not pursue the moon who follows Obama we have um let I get my years correct here and my presidents uh did I leave anybody out

uh Bush Obama who came after Obama uh well Trump came in there at some point I know uh so oh so what happens is so Trump says let's go back to the moon and then the Trump haters say no send Trump to the Moon fine then Biden comes in and preserves this scope for NASA now why does that happen all of a sudden how come it's a real thing how come we have Artemis Chang on we could have done this 50 years ago 40 years ago 30 years ago 20 years ago but we didn't no

why oh we didn't the Gill politics didn't force it what happens China says we're going to put astronauts on the moon all right they just come shy of saying we're going to put military bases on the we're going to put astronauts on the moon oh my gosh all of a sudden it's the right thing for us to do and I'm going to tell you this based on my read of and by the way all of this is in the book just it's it's all in the book everything I'm telling you now is is written done

and I'm ready to talk about something else but I'm telling you that the the if if elon's ships will ever fly to Mars it's cuz China says I'm making this up but let any of them say we want to put military bases on Mars bada bing we're going to Mars we are going to Mars and you know something NASA doesn't really have a ship to do that but you know who does Elon so he rolls out his Mars ship and tax money pays Elon for us to get to Mars and it's not on his dime

it's not I'm going to I I I get it but I'm going to disagree in part here because the fact of the matter is Starship has been built on his dime it's been built it has been launched yes because it's been launched it's been launched three times not successfully not to Mars but the capability once it working has the capability of refueling and going and I hope that and what I'm telling you is what I'm what I'm telling yeah all there what I'm saying is that as a Mars program the cost of that goes beyond

any venture capitalist interest in handing money to Elon even his own money unless he does it as a one-off as a vanity project and holding vanity projects aside if his ships take us to Mars it's because you're my tax money as voted in Congress for our geopolitical defense to protect our space interests against adversaries that's what's going to unfold knowing him well enough he will spend every one of his last dollars making a mission to Mars happen even if the government doesn't want it in fact you know I remember I was it's a one-off vanity

project well but it what listen I don't have a problem with that I'm just saying don't tell me it's a business case the for no it's not a business case it by no means this is a backup Humanity vision for him now that wasn't the conversation I wanted to have with you uh because I'm not a huge Mars fan I mean I love the idea of going to Mars and finding the life that's Sub sub soil there me by the way this idea that it's Mars the idea that it's Earth 2.0 is is that has

serious flaws in it I'd be happy to chat about that with you if we have time but continue yeah so the point is when we talk about where does Humanity expand to next right uh if we're going to start to see millions of people not thousands of people millions of people in space where or when I say in space beyond the Earth's surface where are we going to see that we'll see some large populations of of scientists and researchers on the moon maybe some vacation spots on the moon but I think it's likely to be

on Mars my bet still is on the vision that you know Gerard K O'Neal painted of large cylinders built from Asal materials at this point built by Robotics and AI autonomously without humans in the loop uh sort of creating um ideal environments for us to go into uh and move into without having to worry about all of the issues of getting onto and off of the Martian surface yeah so let me just um say some supportive things of what you just said the JK O'Neal model as you noted has the advantage that you park one

of these at a lran point or somewhere in orbit and so it itself does not have much of any of a gravitational well so you just sort of slide up next to it and disembark and since it's rotating as a rotating cylinder everybody lives on the inner surface of that cylinder and it's rotated to 1G you don't have the bone loss problems or any other health problems related to low G as you would have on the moon as you would have on Mars which is uh those kinds of challenges were thoroughly explored in the TV

series sci-fi story expanse if you look at any expanse episodes um there the people live on Mars there people live on asteroids and their bones are weaker and they can't travel from one place to another because they were born and raised in these different uh sources of gravity and Earth in that mix has the heaviest gravity so the Earth people tend to be sort of sturdier than everybody else so there's been some sci-fi people have thought about this it's completely bypassed when you have a rotating system so the question would be um how idilic will

you make this such that everyone will just want to go will it be like oh the new world is so amazing everybody get in a ship and board one way and you'll get off and you'll never come back is that what you foresee and in how much time yeah so I I do foresee uh one-way missions um in fact I you know I've done this in the lecture Halls at universities typically for uh young graduate students in early 20s asking how many of you would go on a one-way mission to the Martian surface and you

know before they're married or before they have responsibilities the percentage of of hands that go up in the audience is pretty large uh close to 50 there was the the project Mars One do you remember that do lens drop was the entrepreneur he's Dutch which was interesting because I said how does a Dutch person get involved in this and then I realized there was the Dutch East India Trading Company they they were early out of the box in this let's explore the unknown business and of course they have since gone out of business even though

they had many supporters many funders uh we had I had baz laun drop on my podcast it's in our archives and the uh we interviewed one of the people who did sign up he was a young kind of geeky guy liked science and we asked him and I said um so you really want to go one way on this trip and he said and he said yes and I said uh aren't you married and he said yes well what I said what does your wife say about this and he said oh she's encouraged it I

said okay you don't understand what's going on in your marriage good good riddance good riddance um so so yeah I I I I get that but and maybe Elon with his you know Starship is that's a first step but to say we will have robotic AI I mining asteroids building colonies enough for all all of us to move there and live there on what time scale are you imagining this by the way J K O'Neal imagined all of this by the 21st century yeah he wrote his books in the mid late 80s and uh uh

so even earlier was it I think it was earlier High froner High Frontier was earlier was in the mid-70s you're right he wrote he wrote uh 20 208 20084 um uh which is was follow on I mean I I see this occurring in the next 30 Years uh which might be completely ridiculous on your time scale but I think that the abilities to do this um will be there by the 30 years ago was 1994 just to put your predictions in context but we are on a nonlinear curve I would say yes we are would

love to talk about that it's part it's part of your professional identity to be on that exponential I that's that you made a career out of that so I you for this by way but space space has been here to for slow risk averse and government than what our predictions were but other things by the way not everything is on an exponential but overall Society is that's the point so if if you look at the future That Never Was everyone's visions of the future you know no we don't have flying cars and all the rest

of that because everyone imagined that energy would be cheap but what the future brought was cheap information so we have an information driven economy more than an energy driven econ Transportation driv driven economy and everything we have in our information world no body foresaw okay even the best of the of the of the futurists so okay I mean they foresaw pieces of it okay but so so our advances are not on the on the line that most people are drawing where they would rather have it be but there are changes now first of all to

point out that from May of 1961 when JFK said you know let's get to the moon through July of 1969 was extraordinary uh because of the will and because of the you know the 400,000 Americans that joined the Apollo program at one shape or form and yeah engineers and scientists engineers scientists and politicians um but you know what we have today is 3D printing of Rocket components we do have the ability to AI model things we do have the ability for Material Sciences uh we have a whole slew of technologies that if we needed to

go faster and I think uh commercial industry when it's talking about a profit motive or a business motive needs to go fast and efficient as compared to the government because let me ask you this from my point of view NASA is a government works project that keeps the dod company's employed during peace time that's the way I think about it and it's not about that's that's a a a more cynical view which I'm I'm not typically cynical but on the I get that you're definitely not a cynical guy so the fact that you went cynic

there that says something and I and I'm not even going to argue that what I will say however is NASA with all the the Pyramid of of below it that has to be all the moving parts that run 10 NASA centers and all the rest of the the Machinery that NASA is it continues to be the singular agency that is at the frontier of space exploration uh and it's it's not clear that that will be replaced by commercial space exploration because the active exploration almost inherently means there's not a profit there's not an Roi expected

for it and as long as they're not an Roi the motivation then Falls on the on the shoulders of geopolitics rather than on private Enterprise what happens private Enterprise comes later and then they do it more cheaply but they're not going to they're not going to be the first to inv by the way they can be the first to invest in something if it's not that much money but if you're talking the level of money that space involves I do not see private Enterprise leading anything so it depends it depends it depends what the ru

it depends what the rules are right because everything we hold of value on earth metals minerals energy real estate is in near infinite quantities in space but if you can't own it and can't create a market for it then private Enterprise isn't going to be able to invest and capitalize on it so no I'm not saying private Enterprise has no place in space I'm saying they just won't do it first that's all okay uh fair fair enough but I I don't see evidence of I'm not I'm not wishing this were the case I'm simply declaring

that my observation of the delusions of space enthusiast of the past 65 years tells me that the the disconnect comes about because people say we can do it therefore we will no just because you can do something doesn't mean all the forces are aligned for it to happen at all at all and before we went to the moon people thought it was impossible now no one is thinking landing on another planet is impossible so what's in our way is not the technology it's the actual motivation that would fund who would do it first that's all

I'm talking about I it's I understand the incentive business uh very very well yeah and you have to and sometimes you have to incentivize as you've brilliantly done with the X prizes and all the other prizes you've conceived and put into motion I it's how we how we met was it 35 years ago 40 years ago my good it was 30 it was 30 years ago and just to tell that story I had just come up with the idea of the xprize the first one for space flight minutes before you knocked on my door and

and uh yes L literally uh and I read in the back of these science fiction penguin books that uh there were these tear out sheets that you could sign up for a trip to Venus Mars Jupiter Saturn and maybe even Pluto since it was a planet back then and you would submit your name and address and information in this form for a raffle and submitted to the Hayden Planetarium and so where I was recently appointed as chair so I was brand new in that office yes and I'm thinking to myself okay everybody who submitted their

name would be a perfect individual for me to go and hit up to help fund my ex prise for space flight and that was from the 1950s that that that that wasn't that wasn't exactly as clear to me at that point when I knocked on your door and I'm like hey uh Dr Tyson uh do you happen to have a database of all the people who signed up for this because of of archives of everyone who signed up yeah uh so it turns out we were able to recover a small box of them it was

you pulled out a shoe box it was a shoe box yeah I didn't know anything about it right I this is your so that was a clever sort of Ploy but uh you know that's back when addresses didn't even have zip codes were still alive naive I was everybody want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love company is called Fountain life and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins

and a group of very talented Physicians you know most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body we're all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side you go to the physician or the emergency room and they say listen I'm sorry to tell you this but you have this stage three or four going on and you know it didn't start that morning it probably was a problem that's been going on for some time but because we never look we don't find out so what we built at Fountain life

was the world's most advanced diagnostic Centers we have four across the us today and we're building 20 around the world these centers give you a full body m a brain a brain vasculature an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque Dex a scan a Grail blood cancer test a full executive blood workup it's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive 150 gigabyt of data that then go to our AIS and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable you're going to find out eventually you might as well find out

when you can take action Fountain life also has an entire side of Therapeutics we look around the world for the most Advanced Therapeutics that can add 10 20 healthy years to your life and we provide them to you at our centers so if this is of interest to you please go and check it out go to Fountain life.com Peter when Tony and I wrote Our New York Times bestseller life force we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain life memberships if you go to Fountain life.com Peter will put you to the top of

the list really it's something that is um for me one of the most important things I offer my entire family the CEOs of my companies my friends it's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans go to fountainlife decomp it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners all right let's go back to our episode here is a next story that surfaced this week um uh so large amounts of water appeared to be subsurface on Mars are you tracking the story no I'm not but that

we expect that uh we Mars clearly if you look at its surface today there's no end of Visual Evidence of their once having been running water their Meandering riverbeds river deltas flood Plaines all the telltale signs of of erosion caused by slowly flowing water and rapidly flowing water and Mars is bone dry today we have to ask where did the water go and the bedding person's uh suggestion was that it it was sunken into the surf beneath the surface as a permafrost and you just have to go down there melt it or there could be

some Pockets if there's any energy source at all that would maintain water in liquid form and if that's the case that would be a very high Target in for the search for Life everywhere on Earth where we find liquid water we find life including the Dead Sea Dead Sea because whoever named it didn't have a microscope I'm GNA I'm going to put on your your betting man's hat so uh probability that there is life of any type on Mars today where do you put that today that's a little harder whether there was once life sure

life got started on Earth pretty quickly within about a 100 billion years of the Earth earliest moment it possibly could have formed and and that's not very did I say 100 billion sorry 100 million years um that's a very short interval of time compared about half about half a billion years after the earth was formed right so four and a half billion years ago yeah so 4 billion years ago you know the in the early textbooks they dated the earliest fossil evidence of life from the formation scenario of the earth that would have given you

600 million years or so but that's not to life because Earth was hot Earth was hotter than what could sustain complex molecules so give it a chance please okay so Earth cools down then you have a period of heavy bombardment heated up again that's leftovers from the formation of the solar system that has to cool down now you can start making complex molecules but you haven't answered my question oh what what's the probability today if you had to put you know uh as a a Bing man that life exists subsurface permafrost maybe 50/50 microbial life

definitely nothing more complex than that because you you can't be highly complex life and navigating rocks inside the rocks and the we can't call it soil because it's not soil but the the regolith of Mars you can't you have to be small enough to be able to make that your home and that would be microbial life so I I maybe 50/50 microbial life but I don't think anything more complex than that now the next question is we know that um ejecta from asteroid impacts on the Martian surface reaches the earth and the the lunar surface

as well and the lunar surface cool but I know where you're going with this but let me slip something in okay sure it goes both ways it goes all ways right a lot of asteroids moving through space were ejected rocks from their home planet that means means there could be rocks from Earth that are meteorites on the moon and if that's the case we could find fossilized evidence of Earth life in meteorites on the moon that's a whole other project that somebody needs to undertake well I think when you make your trip there you should

go out fossil I'll do I'll do that but uh the point and you know where I'm going with this is Mars cooled first being further from the earth well and also being smaller when you're smaller you have a higher surface area to volume ratio and whenever that happens you you will cool so a small potato will cool faster than a big potato after you pull them out of the oven Mars is 1/10th our Mass something like that and uh you know one what is it uh 13 one half one two and a halfs our size

and so you uh it will cool way faster than Earth does but go on so the question of course is is Earth life actually Martian life did it form on Mars first and then did ejecta from the Martian surface reach the Earth and begin a process here yeah it's crazy as that idea sounds it's completely plausible yeah because if Mars formed early cooled earlier formed light and it had water formed life earlier than Earth formed life and we're still living in a active early period of Earth Solar System where uh impacts were more common than

they are today it is completely rational to suspect that or even logical to suspect that a rock on Mars where microbial life living in the nooks and crannies of that rock moves through space after having been ejected and finds Earth's gravity lands on Earth Dawning life on earth now very important here many people misunderstand Evolution let me just make it clear in evolution no animal adapts to anything it either survives the change or dies it does not adapt okay what happens is at any given generation the of a species there's variation typically in in what

is born and that variation is random and if there's an assault on the environment that favors one of those variations then that variation will walk through that portal into that new environment and all the rest die none of them adapted to anything adaption sounds like it's an active thing that you are doing on purpose but that's not how any of this works I say this because the rock going through space where there's no water there is high radiation there's high temperature coming out and landing and there cold temperature in the all of these are forces

operating on all the microbes most microbes will die if any microb happen to have resistance to radiation to pressure to temperature it will survive yes and on Earth you look around is there anybody who has this kind of resistance on Earth and you can't help but look at the top of that list and you get the tardigrade water bear M this microscopic you you can't kill this thing okay it's you can IR radiate it you can freeze dry it you withhold water from it it curls up and waits around like however long it takes for

water to show up again it pops back to life where the hell did this creature get these abilities because it certainly wasn't on Earth because these forces operating to for its survival would have been the properties of space now we don't think it came from space but that's an example of how you would reason go through the reasoning about whether something on Earth Came From Mars because it has to get through space first and of course on Earth we see all these extremophiles in the hydrothermal events and deep in the ocean at the uh point

of volcanic eruptions we see things and in the coldest places on Earth so that's a reminder that unlike how we you and I learn biology in our textbooks you don't need this 72 Degree tide poool you know where everything's just right life can thrive in far greater range of environments than we were ever taught in the early days of learning like about life on Earth and if that's the case of course that opens up the options for places in the universe that previously we might have thought to be hostile to life where you can find

s just doing the backstroke CU they love the extreme environments and like you said we have a whole term for them they call the extremophiles but here's the point if we go to Mars there two scenarios when we go to Mars when we go to Mars Mr optimistic man oh come on do do you think there's okay listen you know we could end as a species that's true but at some point somewhere if we go to Mars it's because the military forces of the world required of us you and I will you and I will

continue to differ on that point and yeah but I have the evidence of history on my side you you have wishful thinking on your side that's the difference here that's all I'm saying uh we have we have exp we have individual explorers who have whove uh charted pths yeah but but going to Mars is not an individual Explorer that's a trillion dollars right there a trillion dollar hundreds of billions of dollars that's not private money making that happen so this next topic here I I'll tell you I'll remember when I was with Elon on a

particular day he was extremely glum and I'm like why you so glum and he goes just figured out that Falcon 9 cannot get us to Mars and he said I have to stop and I need to build something bigger and Starship was designed not for the lunar program it was designed for going to Mars and retrofitted for the uh Moon Mars initiative but how do you fund this thing and uh starlink um is his Venture uh to fund this thing how do you get a trillion dollars in value you plug into a large consumer base

engine economic engine which is Communications and I think he's doing pretty damn good I'm not sure I actually switched to T-Mobile on this uh on this note um so very Loy of you I I know I know well you know the idea of communicating over over starlink is pretty cool U but okay so I was recently on a ship yes circumnavigating Iceland and we crossed the Arctic Circle where there are no cell phone towers and all of our internet there was via starlink and that was the first time I was on starlink bandwidth is very

modest like one megabit per second but enough to do email and not to stream 4K video but it definitely enabled communication so of course star Link's greatest value is where you don't otherwise have typical uh cell phone Communications so for so we can ask the very simple question how many people will be served by star length at very high latitudes and that number is vanishingly small compared to everybody else who's served by cell phone towers I'll tell you I use it on my airplane when I fly things because the cell phone towers are there just

not in communication so how many people are yeah sorry and high to or high elevation yes so so so again you are can I just back up for a minute you mentioned President Kennedy's speech so you may remember Kennedy gave two speeches the first was to a joint session of Congress in May 1961 as you correctly remembered then he gave a speech the next year 1962 a little little more fleshed out with the idea of going to the moon but that original speech which we remember you know we'll we will put a man on the

moon before the decade is out and return him safely to Earth this sort of thing you can even hear his Brookline Massachusetts accent saying it right that's how that's how resonant those words are in so many of us that's fine and you realize in Kennedy Space Center Florida there's a bust of Kennedy and in the granite next to the bus are those very words chiseled in there it is but man on the moon before the decade they say ah we had leaders back then with Visionaries and and then excuse me excuse me go back a

few paragraphs in that speech oh Nobody Does that why why don't they let's find out what else he said that day what did he say that day to a joint session of Congress before he said let's go to the Moon he he he says if the events of recent weeks could not utter the man's name Yuri Gagarin okay who had just come out of orbit could not utter his name said if the events of re I'm paraphrasing the events of recent weeks are any indication of the impact of this adventure on the minds of men

everywhere then we need to show the world the path of Freedom over the path of tyranny that was the battlecry against communism and that's actually what wrote the checks not the stirring rhetoric about how wonderful it would be to explore the Moon it was we we were scared witless that the Godless communist would get the new high ground that so let's be honest with ourselves and the and when people don't recall that part of the speech that's part of the delusional state that we occupy when we're trying to make predictions about the future yeah we'll

be on Mars if China says they want to set up base camp then we're going to Mars if China doesn't do that my read of History tells me we're never going to Mars so I hear you my friend I hear you and I think that you're right on so many levels but but I still believe we have moved from the era where only governments could and large corporations could do things at this scale to the point where entrepreneurs and individuals can do things you know it used to be the Kings and the queens and Rober

Barons the only person who could possibly you know change the world and today individuals are and that will always be my my belief no individuals just to be clear individuals have always changed the world uh so I don't want to under under celebrate but there is there is a different there's a different run around with a trillion dollars and they just spend it all they they change the world with their views with their with their Spirit energy to convince people that something what we should be doing colle you know let's look at the railroads let's

look at the oil industry uh but they you know they were underwritten by The Rockefellers and and such yes there was economic engines there and there need to be economic excuse me who protected the railroads it was the US Cavalry excuse me just just the government was totally in that just just you sound like n Gingrich who was a very big railroad analogist if I know where he said if we' given the NASA's money to private Enterprise we would have been in the moon 10 times over the no no there's there's complete economic value to

land that you're going to take from the Indians this this was the entire movement and had farmland and minerals and so so did not there one I understand the need for a boogeyman to use that term there is another one out there uh you know many years ago I flew stepen Hawking into zero g do you remember that I don't I didn't know you were part of that but I did know he was z g thanks for doing that that was you know he that's he needed to do that and that's yeah it was it

was my company's zero gravity Corporation we fly these parabolic flights and this another you know overnight success after 11 years of hard work started in 93 finally I bet it didn't cost you a trillion dollars cost you a lot of money but not a trillion dollars go so in 2006 after the Ansari ex prize was one it was one in 2004 but two years later I'm I find myself on the phone with with with Professor Hawking on his computer and with his uh his administrative assistant/ nurse and he is asking me the question whether I

can fly him on a suborbital flight into space and I say I'm sorry Professor Hawking I can't do that but I can fly you on a zero g flight and I thought you know taking the world's expert in gravity into zero gravity what could be better long story there different podcast episode that I recorded on on zogg when he is at the Kennedy Space Center when we're getting ready to take off he agrees to do a pre-flight press conference and we had no idea how he would do on this flight right he's very frail um

his lungs his ribs you know uh how we had a whole emergency room Medical Center on the flight and uh in the pre-flight press conference uh he was asked the question you you don't want headlines Peter dandz kills yes yes that was bad PR for zero believe me I had uh I had the FAA telling me I could not make they I was disallowed from doing the flight after IID spent 11 years and uh I said why and they said your operating specifications require you to only fly able-bodied people and I had the presence of

mind to ask well who determines whether they're able-bodied and the FAA person said well I I guess a flight doc or his Physicians I said great I bought malpractice for those individuals got them to write letters to fa that he was able body to fly to Zerg and they basically said it's your ass good luck that's right but they got their paperwork so their ass is covered by the paperwork exactly so long story short um were at the pre-flight press conference and he's asked why are you doing this and he goes um given all the

paraphrasing it all the risks Humanity has from nuclear war uh and um and uh I uh pandemics he didn't include AI there he said I don't think the human race has a future unless we uh expand our presence out into space and so the problem is that's not a clear and present danger on the top of people's minds like Russia Soviet Union or China but it is an important element right this is what Elon keeps on going we have to spread the the light of Consciousness beyond the planet yeah I would so I don't know

if you want to talk about that now but I'm happy to I would ask why do you want to do that uh in case the Earth should be or Humanity should be wiped out by some um existential threat such as give me your top three uh asteroid approaching us from the Sun um before we had a chance to see it um nuclear Armageddon um a uh a well-engineered killer virus pandemic Okay so um so those everything you just said makes complete sense and makes perfectly readable headlines yes all your eggs in one basket everyone understands

that principle okay I have a more practical view of all of this please tell me which is it seems to me that whatever it takes to terraform Mars and ship a billion people there that's seems to me to be more effort than finding all dangerous asteroids and deflecting them just seems to me I'm just just just saying I'm just I'm just spitballing here okay it seems to me that if we trash Earth with climate change and and what or there's some uh killer virus it seems to me that medical research to find a perfect antiviral

serum given our access to the human genome and with AI assisted understanding of proteins and whatever else it seems to me that is a more realistic plan than shipping a billion people to Mars in case one planet gets taken out that way and so so the the the reality of this for me is I would love to go to Mars but not because if we go to Mars then half of all humans will die and we protect the remaining like what really no you want to save all humans no matter where we are and if

you can do that to Mars every possible scenario we can think of today is Trivial to solve it seems to me compared with what you want to accomplish by shipping a billion people or a million let's let's begin I'm not I'm not saying a billion and I'm not a Mars fan whatever the number but but I am I terraform Mars if you want to like like Elon wants to do yeah well or we need to back up some some significant population uh off of planet now listen I have read maybe too many science fiction books

uh and looking and looking for thing is too much science fiction and looking for and looking for rationale to fund our our space programs but you know we are uh you know thousands of years from now millions of years now whatever we evolve to we're going to look back at these next few decades as the moment in time that the human race moves irreversibly off the planet right we are the lungfish equivalent and that's part of evolution is our one fish the first creature to move out of the oceans onto land yes so I think

that I think that is in our it's not a genotype it is a phenotype of humans to desire to explore and I agree but I'm by the way you're mixing two highly separable variables there one of them is we want to go to Mars cuz it's cool and we're going to explore and we're going to be the lung fish leaving Earth going to cool let's do it but if you're motivated by saying let's do that so that half the humans will die while the other half survives and we're not going to save everybody that's for

me that no no I'm not I'm not saying that I'm just saying this is consequence of what you're say this is insurance policies this is insurance polic that's what I uttered I uttered the insurance policy for the species I'm I'm saying by the time we can do that on Mars all of your dreams of mining asteroids will be true they'll all be true and if we can mine asteroids it's like hey Mining Company 807 we've detected an asteroid headed our way go to them and mine them to zero okay or or deflect them they'll have

the ability to do this I I sure I sure hope so did you see the movie Oppenheimer if you did did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs that they spent billions on biod defense weapons the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA well a company called viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood now viome has a product that I've personally used for years called full body intelligence which collects

a few drops of your blood spit and stool and can tell you so much about your health they've tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical Health guidance like what foods you should eat what foods you shouldn't eat as well as your supplements and probotics your biological age and other deep Health insights and the results of the recommendations are nothing short of Stellar you know as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle medicine after just 6 months of following biomes recommend s members reported the following a 36% reduction in depression

a 40% reduction in anxiety a 30% reduction in diabetes and a 48% reduction in IBS listen I've been using viome for 3 years I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities best of all viome is Affordable which is part of my mission to democratize health if you want to join me on this journey go to vi.com Peter I've asked navine Jane a friend of mine who's the founder and CEO of viome to give my listeners a special discount you'll find it at vom.com Peter uh let's turn to a much

more scientific conversation here um uh we've seen hearings in Congress a number of hearings about UFOs I'm I'm curious I mean you must been asked over and over again what do you think of these seems like super credible individuals um who are uh bringing forward what they believe as uh as viable evidence for these unidentified flying objects not even called UFOs anymore are they they're called something uaps yeah UAP unidentified uh paranormal anomalous phenomena okay yeah which who are they kidding they mean UFOs they're just trying to Rebrand it so to get rid of the

giggle Factor um so yeah the government calls them uaps so I and I noticed that the news nation is saying forget the UAP let's go back to what everyone knows what these are um so you want I think they're interesting Mysteries I don't have any problem investigating Mysteries but if you want to think that the thing you don't know what you're looking at are visiting aliens from outer space that's a leap you can't go from I don't know what I'm looking at to I definitely know what I'm looking at I'm looking at aliens that that's

you can't do that because you're replacing certainty you're replacing ignorance with certainty in the absence of anything to bridge that Gap so these are fun I'd be curious I have other questions like why is it that the James web Space Telescope can produce high resolution color images of gas clouds 7,000 light years away yet the best evidence we have for aliens is monochromatic fuzzy Tic Tac in restricted airspace on Earth seen only by the US Navy that's a little weird to me and by the way it's in our own atmosphere and that's the best image

they can produce that's a little weird to me so other thing at any given moment you surely know a million people are airborne a million with a window and there's six at least six billion smartphones in the world each capable of high resolution photos and videos if we were being invaded by aliens we have we have the capacity to crowdsource that phenomenon cat videos go viral overnight if you get any picture of an alien or their spaceship that with with the detail you'd expect from high resolution photography oh my gosh the world will know about

it overnight overnight but that's not what's happening here so all of a sudden we're thinking that the Pentagon has special access to aliens really really we have people everywhere on Earth even places where the Pentagon isn't and no we don't see so we have fuzzy images fine keep keep looking for them I don't want to stop people's enthusiasm for this I don't know what that is go figure it out but but I'm I'm just thinking if we were being invaded by aliens we would not require Congressional hearings to establish that fact I love it by

the way one of the testifiers back last summer said he had uh he had um uh nonhuman biologics yes in a lock box in the back and you know I I take people at their word you know what would a non-human biologics be well take the tree of life with everything on it all the plants animals fungus insects everything and remove the branch that are humans and everything else would be non-human biologics so he could have tree bark in his in his lock box for all I know based on that kind of testimony Neil I

want to switch us over to another uh subject that uh is making the headlines heavily and it's AI um how do you feel about AI safety uh what are your what are your thoughts are you concerned about the speed at which AI is progressing I'm not I'm not uniquely concerned about relative to any other highly powerful bit of Technology science engineering that we have brought upon ourselves in the history of civilization so no I'm not uniquely worried I think there should be constraints yes there should be but the constraints need to be established by people

who know what they're constraining it can't just be some members of Congress who read a few headlines and now they want to pass legislation based on a Fear Factor it has to be intelligently reasoned debated of course uh and by the way you need politicians in that debate because politicians are our Collective representatives and so they carry some of the fears or the joys of the citizenry so but you would have this conversation to find out what would be taking AI too far and let's put constraints make that illegal to take it too far what

would be just right and then you have examp of what would be just right so this week California legislature approves a bill with sweeping AI uh restrictions I I find you know listen safety standards requiring large-scale AI companies to undergo safety testing before deployment fantastic in fact open AI anthropic have volunteered to do this transparency great but this is interesting worker protections um protecting workers and call centers from being replaced by AI um well that would be right for Republicans to argue against okay that's that's like a that's that's like raw meat for a republican

um I I that I think is naive yes that would be like passing a law saying we have to protect all Auto Workers from these Bots that are now assembling our cars that you know if had you done that then we would have trailed the world in an entire industry and the industry would have gone out of business so there's C so that looks a little naive to me and uh so oh by the way we you and I are old enough to remember that when cars were made by humans there was a very real

chance that in the morning your car wouldn't start okay I was I was showing a movie to my son from the movie was from like the 70s and the the the the the bad guys are are running to get away and they get in the car and they try to start the car and it doesn't turn over and my son said didn't they have gas in the car it's not he can't think that why would a car not start of course it's going to start it's a machine that works perfectly right so so cars are

lighter faster better more fuel efficient than they've ever been and they're all made by robots so so we have to one has to think about if if you want to be proactive about it what you should say is what new job opportunities will AI bring to us rather than complain about what jobs it replaces just to keep that in mind and by the way Hollywood went through this brilliantly all right the the strikes that happened was it a year ago just coming out of Co were part of those those arguments and I'm a member of

sag aftera The Screen Actors Guild American Federation of radio and television artists that's the two unions had joined together cuz I I've had some cameos not that I'm a big time actor of course I'm not I don't know how to act but I can be myself as a cameo in a tiny role as I have been in a few movies but uh one of their concerns was they don't want a movie studio that has access to your your video record to now recreate your character and your voice for a role that you don't even have

to show up for and even more so than that is the concern let's say I have 20 seasons of Law and Order right I have staff writers that wrote them all I in I get an AI bot to ingest all 20 seasons and I say write me 20 more seasons on this topic that topic that topic in the style that these previous 20 had been written well that's clearly intellectual property theft at that level and so this all had to be hammered out and it was so let me let me ask you because this is

interesting right the disruption of the hegemony of Hollywood is is coming because we're not far if we're not there already from the studio saying I'm going to create my own stars and starlets um and we're going to own them and they're going to be fully digital uh and we're going to make our movies based on them we're going to we're going to create cartoons are that's what cartoons are but when when they become when they become lifelike or we're going to bring back Marilyn animated cartoons they're animated movies Disney created The Lion King so what's

your point somebody gets somebody gets money for The Voice okay of course that was James Earl Jones Okay as as muasa but the character that Disney owns the characters so what's different to you about this only that they are photorealistic human characters that uh would uh obviate the need for actors at some point in the future okay so I wonder if that's an interesting future uh I wonder if they would ever become as popular as real human being actors where the Press you know where TMZ follows them when they come out of the restaurant or

you know if you're not an actual living thing is the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous will that will anyone have any interest at all I'd bet not so let's take a look at this this is out of uh you got no end of of of slides here I this is fascinating for me so let's check this out here so the ability of uh AI to create uh effectively total disinformation right so uh do you imagine we're going to head towards a future of defaulting to disbelief yes yes in fact uh I foresee so my

my big prediction here I predict that we are within 5 years or less possibly three of an internet where the Deep f fakes are so good that even people who believed that fake news was real will no longer believe the fake news okay think about think we're defaulting to disbelief it's that's so the people who believed The Fakes will no longer Believe The Fakes because they'll think the fakes are faked okay those who thought the fakes were real will no longer believe that the fakes are real because they'll think the fakes are fakes the day

that happens will represent an implosion of information Integrity of the entire internet and that and you and that'll be its Tombstone the internet you know 1994 to 2028 rest in peace and all that will remain are cat videos and other entertaining postings which is how we all were baptized into the internet 30 years ago it will no longer be a source of objective truth of objective information and we'll have to resort to books oh my gosh or actual one-on-one interviews things like that I that is the future yeah and and it'll it'll it'll be its

own fault right or with the rules and regulations it'll be a crime to have a deep fake that is not otherwise watermarked as such counterfeiting counter R found out then you are sent to prison so you can't stop people from doing nefarious things but you can have a penalty for them if they do and maybe that will help rain some of this in real quick I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin truth is I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called one skin it was developed by four PhD

women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a cytic that kills scile cells in your skin and this literally reverses the age of your skin and I think it's one of the most incredible products I use it all the time uh if you're interested check out the show notes I've asked my team to link to it below all right let's get back to the episode have you been tracking the uh the humanoid robot ores I'm not into humorid robots I think it's a waste of time really I won't tell other people to of

time but personally you know I don't I don't go on on the airwaves or on the Internet Posting my opinions because I don't care whether anybody shares my opinion at all okay well I care whether your what your opinion is here so why do you why do you think that I feel the love thank you thank you Peter um this to build a humanoid implies that there's something useful about a humanoid when in practically anything we need a human to do we can make a machine that does it better and the Machine doesn't look human

right on down to the running Blades of sprinters who don't have feet okay I remembered in elementary school my teacher saying oh the human body is so welld designed and the the feet are all the every bone in the right place and tendon and ligament and uh and it's perfect for walking and running and keeping our balance the people don't have feet you give them blades they can run faster than they would have without feet so the idea that the human form is something to emulate I find to be shortsighted because if you want to

get tasks done to have a human do the T no no you go to remember the Jetson okay the jeton remember oh by the way 2022 that year all evidence shows that that's the year George Jetson was born sharing that with you and that was the year of soilent green took place but um in the jetss he had a car that he flew at the time no one would imagine a self-driving car they would imagine a humanoid robot who would drive the car for you just take out the middleman take out the middle bot and

the car is the robot and you know something it's in the shape of a car cuz that's what you need it to do well so this hunt to get a I don't um other than for you know to help autistic children relate to humans if it's if you can get out of that uncanny valley sure but for the utility of a robot to be in a human form I don't see that taking on at all do you want to hear the argument for it please so uh we are running a global5 110 trillion do GDP

and right now half that GDP is labor and it's human Labor uh the projections that you know I showed you that image of the three top robot companies domestic or uh you know 1X and and Optimus by Tesla and figure 2 by figure um their price point tet no longer in the running there Japan Japan no they they're about 30 well-funded human right robot companies and there's many in China right China's got the problem that it based its entire economy on labor rates and labor rates are going up and people are no longer Manufacturing in

China they're manufacturing domestically with 3D printers and local manufacturing improvements and so forth so uh and China's also got the issue of an aging population without you know it's the one child policy basically left uh you know half the grandparents without a kid to take care of bit him in the ass yeah yeah um so the these robots uh uh there's unit tree out of China which is a $16,000 robot so the the numbers right now are trending towards a $20,000 price tag for one of these robots if you look at it on a price

per kilogram which you know I I think is a reliably it's call it $40,000 per robot so you're able to rent or lease a robot for $100 $200 per month um you know I can think of a thousand things like cleaning up my house doing the laundry mowing the you know the lawn just anything that I don't need to do uh if these robots are mult driven by multimodal multimodal AI that are just helping around the projections right now may be off but um you know on the order of by 2040 somewhere between 1 to

10 billion one to 10 billion humanoid robots on the planet um I that means as many human robots as humans that's more more than you know elon's predictions and God knows he is not always right but he thinks more prevalent than cars on the planet but having one of these uh sort of multimodal full utility capabilities that gives your AI arms and legs to do things right like you know please take care of everything in the house go shopping go get these things for me um you know the one thing that we humans all have

in common is 24 hours in a day 7 days in a week and the wealthy differentiate from the poor by having other people to do things for them or the ability to you know uh save time by hopping on a private jet so I think these are Time Savers and the ability to make yourself multi- presentent um does that not have appeal for you so this would be to put a person a robotic person in place of tasks that are not otherwise streamlined to happen without a person so I there would surely be a Marketplace

for that over some interval of time but why not design a house why not design laundry that cleans itself or some because because a because building a humanoid robot that can do what a human do in a human environment that's driven by an AI at a human or above capability allows you to do everything without redesigning everything yeah no I get that designs change right so so yeah I agree but we're not going to not design everything forever all right so I'm going to say I don't want a robot I'm going to find a way

I'm going to design my home so I don't need the robot okay I'm going to design my home so that I don't I'm going to design my car so I don't need a robot to drive me to work oh I have a self-driving car right this is my point the self-driving car is the single best earliest example of the of to me why you will not ultimately not need humanoid robots because you're going to build a thing that is itself the robot and it doesn't look anything like a human well we call everything that be

that works like this we call the robot that cleans dishes dishwasher exactly we we give it we give a name so you going to get a robot to load the dishwasher are you that lazy probably by the way remember on the Jetson the maid I forgot her name yeah Rosie Rosie Rosie of course Rosie uh you know she she wore a little Maids you know uh Neil you've got a new book coming out in a few weeks tell me about it thank you giving it a shout out no so it's it's oh my gosh this

is is I almost well up when I comment on this this is emotional this is deep a little bit a little bit a little bit my very first book yes that I published back in the 1980s while I was in graduate school you were 18 at the time I have updated into the 21st century and at the time I wrote a column and it was called Merlin Merlin and I created for Merlin it's a different Merlin than your favorite Merlin but it's similarly magical this Merlin has lived for all of time and if you ask

Merlin it was a question and answer column you'd ask Merlin dear Merlin I don't quite know how gravity works and because Merlin has lived for all of time Merlin just recounts a conversation with Isaac Newton and you'll see the the dialogue between the two of them as the reply to that question and so so this access through time and space has made for a much richer question and answer experience for the reader than I think would otherwise be possible well I I it's called Merlin's tour of the universe and my brother Illustrated it so he's

he's an artist and there's and there sort of playful fun irreverent illustrations throughout does he does he do this one as well uh yes no no he did it he did the original and so we update you have to a lot of science had to be updated of course because this was from 30 years 35 years ago but it was I I mean I I I well up a little bit because reinhabiting the character of Merlin in this book bringing it up to date it was it was so joyous to have done it the first

time and to do it a second time was even more so and then I'm reminded that Merlin is actually sort of tur where necessary and witty and a little bit irreverent and I re and the answers are mostly short and I realized that was my proven ground for my my postings on Twitter okay it was like I was I was being honed for that for the short form commentary on the world just ahead of your time at the end of October mer Merlin's tour of the universe yeah and it's and I just checked and it's

you can you can pre- bu it on Amazon so pre-order yeah yeah okay excellent they got that it only just would have just been listed there because we're just putting in the final touches out so who's it who's it for by the way who' you write it for originally and now oh no no I mean it was the it was a question and answer column so it tended to be a lot of retired people with like time on their hands to like think question and curiosity yeah and curiosity you know retired people who who who

were lifelong Learners um but there's some very young people where the question was asked by the parent like one of them was uh apparently a four-year-old asked this via the mother it was if if if rain make rainbows then can a moon make moonbows something like that right it's a cute little thing and uh there's also sometimes Merlin is is is prone to rhyme all right so if if rhyming gives a better answer than otherwise so so can I can I share one with you please I'd love to this the first time I'm talking about

in any platform first time I'm talking about it so you get it first here thank you someone asked uh dear Merin are are red star red stars red because they're hotter than blue stars okay they perfectly rational question and so rather than just say yes or no so Merlin just fleshes it out a bit so here it goes um hang on on canvas with paint in the artist's school it is red that is Hot and Blue that is cool but in science we show as the heat gets higher a star will glow red like the

coals of a fire but raise the heat some more and what is in sight behold the star has turned bright white but the hottest of all Merlin says unto you is neither red nor white when a star has turned blue Ah that's beautiful the challenge there was making it astrophysically accurate so that you have a new career my friend so so blue hot is the hottest of all yes as wers know for example and and the stove that you turn on that turns red hot we think of that as the limiting hot but if you

kept increasing the heat it would turn white hot it would melt but if you kept heating it even in a melted state it would start glowing blue hot and that's what's going on in the Stars anyhow so this is just a fun romp and I'm I'm all the clamped Marlin tour of the universe uh on your on your favorite uh book purchasing do you read the book as well are you for audible are you going to oh thank you yes yes yes in fact the the company that's publishing the the printed book cut their teeth

as a as an audio book company it's called Blackstone Publishers and so yes I I read all the answers but we got voice actors to be the people asking the questions great fun plus plus I when I when Merlin has a conversation with Isaac Newton we got to get a Brit in there with the Isaac Newton accent know you got to do that so so the the conversations are split up that way yeah one one last topic before we we jump uh we're going to be seeing each other again uh in about a month's time

that's on my calendar I look forward to that yeah this is the 30th anniversary of the xprize which we spoke about when you and I met some 30 years ago and uh you're going to be on stage live with me and we'll be recording audience I've not gotten an invitation until now and you've been doing this for 29 years I just want your audience to know this to make it super special for you my friend 30 years is a is an interesting interval of time that's why I'm say that's why I'm mentioning this yes because

it's the subject of one of your other books and we're going to be talking 30 years ago and 30 years into the future yeah thanks oh my gosh yes 30 years so in 2022 I published a book called Star Messenger Cosmic perspectives on civilization and it has all the wisdom that I've gleaned as a scientist in this world is in that book and I could not have written it 5 years earlier 10 years I was not wise enough to bring Pen to page for what's in that book uh one of the chapters is oh by

the way so it's what civilization looks like if you scientifically literate and if you have a dose of cosmic perspective and it's stuff in society and all these paired words that we argue about over Thanksgiving are the titles of chapters like color and race law and order gender and identity life and death truth and Beauty this it goes on and on and on and it's what those look like if you are a scientist and you say you know you haven't evaluated all the evidence or you think you're eval but because what what is a scientists

do but load up all the evidence and let the evidence do the talking but if you do the talking instead of the evidence you're going to land in a place that is does not match objective reality so that's what the book is one of the chapters is called exploration and discovery and I spend half that chapter on this journey from 1870 to 2020 in 30-year increments highlighting the fact that the world at the end of each 30-year increment is completely unrecognizable to the people at the beginning of that 30-year increment the way we live the

way we communicate the what we do with our time what we care about is completely different and I suppose one could have done a 20-year interval or a 50-year interval 30 seemed about right and so the fact that we're on a 30-year cusp here that's interesting so 30 years ago we're talking 1994 I suppose right yes exactly so I a big point that I make is that almost every prediction made at the beginning of a 30-year period just is comes out wrong they just get it wrong because the advances going exponentially come from places no

one is thinking they come from I'll give an example and I give this in the book in the year 1900 30 years after 1870 that's when everyone talks about the year 2000 right because it's a 100 years hence all right so they draw pictures of what they imagine the future to be like here's one of them you ready there's a steamship coming on too sure cuz steamships in 1900 was the way to go crossing the Atlantic the the steam ship comes onto the shore and railroad Wheels pop into place and it goes straight onto a

railroad to continue the cargo Transportation this was the future you go straight from ships to rail oh my gosh what else would it do oh it had sidewalks that were on different levels and the sidewalks were on rollers so it's just so quaint and everyone had personal balloons that was strapped under your arm armpit so you can float around and get places because blimps and durables were all the rage okay sorry that is what they predicted for the year 2000 when three years later we'd have the airplane yes okay you can't give away a blimp

today all right so I I do a deep dive into what people are doing at the beginning and at the end of these intervals and it's freaking mindblowing what has gone on in the last 150 years so when people say what's life going to be like in 50 years or 30 in the year 2050 I'm saying give up don't even try go home H one one last thing I I quote a guy from uh from the Brooklyn daily Eagle in the year 1900 he he works for the New York Central Railroad so he's in the

world of transportation and he's and by the way what's going on in the 1900 the internal combustion engine car was just invented the the the modern bicycle took final form the the country is crisscross with railroad steam ships durables he says we can scarcely imagine that progress in transportation in the 20th century will be as great as the progress we've made in the 19th century that's got to be the most boneheaded prediction ever made ever uh ever so now maybe you're not one of these guys making these boneheaded predictions because that was a reverse prediction

that was it'll never be as advanced as we have it now and you're trying to go the other way with your ex prize and you know maybe you land somewhere in the middle but I'm betting in 1994 there are things happening today you had no idea would be going on in this world for sure for sure and as you said earlier a lot of it has been in the digital information you're future man if there's a future man walking this Earth it's you okay you put money behind your future Investments so that's you're not just

writing a book you know of predictions and sitting back and waiting for people to say what comes true or not you've got skin in the game and so I applaud you for that thank you buddy uh where do people find you obviously star talk if you have not yet listened to Star podcast yes Star Talk yeah we we it's it's it's how long has it been going on it's been oh yeah since uh 2009 so it's on his 15 one of the earliest podcast out there it's one of the earliest in fact we were terrestrial

radio before we were uh before podcast were a thing we also have a stint on television before Disney bought National Geographic um we we were on National Geographic television and so there are episodes that are there uh but we've been going strong ever since and it's bringing the universe down to earth in a fun way I have a co-host who's a a comedian who's a force of levity in the conversation and my guests are a force of gravity and I carry the control knob so it's the right mixture for everybody at all times and uh

I see you on uh X occasionally on Twitter yeah yeah i' I've been posting to X less often yeah um what's been you know algorithms have changed I have a huge following on X it's like it's like nearly 15 million people but with algorithms now it's just what is the virality of what you post more than your following that's going to then view it and we've had some highly viral postings from my podcast uh because we're now clipping the podcast and posting them on on Tik Tok and and Instagram so so X has has become

less of an object of affection for me in recent months and years than it had been well buddy I am grateful for you in this universe and on this planet but but just to be clear so I'm Neil degrass Tyson on all platforms except for X where that's too many letters to use up in your character allocation so I'm Neil Tyson on on Twitter X but Neil gr tyon everywhere else and and the podcast is star talk so thanks for those shout outs of course buddy I I look forward to seeing you you on the

stage at ex prise visioneering uh towards the end of October and thank you for joining me my friend great to see you [Music]