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

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

In this episode, Neil and Peter discuss recent AI, Space, and UFO news, including the stranded astronauts, the Bezos vs. Musk space race, when humans will move to Mars, and more.  Recorded on Sept 3rd, 2024 Views are my own thoughts, not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. 19:50 | The Geopolitics of Space Travel 43:15 | Life on Mars: A Real Possibility? 01:08:40 | The Truth Behind UFO Sightings Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator best known for making complex scientific concepts accessible to the general public. As the director of the Hayden Planetarium and host of popular science shows like Cosmos and StarTalk, he has become a prominent advocate for science education. Tyson's work spans academia and media, focusing on promoting scientific literacy and inspiring curiosity about the universe. Pre-order Neil’s new book: https://www.amazon.com/Merlins-Universe-Revised-Updated-Twenty-First/dp/1665019859  Watch StarTalk: https://www.youtube.com/@StarTalk  ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter  Reverse the age of your skin with Oneskin; 30% here: http://oneskin.co/PETER    _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6  I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots

Probability that there is life of any type on Mars today. Where do you put that? Today, that's a little hard. 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, as crazy as that idea sounds, it's completely plausible. Hi everybody, Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moonshots.

Today's special episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech with the one and only Neil deGrasse Tyson, extraordinary author, scientist, and just provocateur 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 Blue Origin. Are you a Musk fan, a Bezos fan? Will we go to Mars? Should we be going to Mars? 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 that are coming up. We'll be discussing against the recent news pieces. If you're watching this on YouTube

You'll see the slides. We're gonna be speaking about AI. We'll be talking about humanoid robotics again. Neil and I disagree I think humanoid robotics are critically important are gonna 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 deGrasse 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 friend, a dear friend.

I won't say an old friend, because that sort of implies that you're old, but chronologically, we did meet some 30, 40 years ago. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Neil, good to see you. Yeah, thanks for having me. About time you had me on your show. I tell you, I'm jealous. You know, right? You know, I'm here for you. I appreciate it, buddy.

I would love to talk about some of the recent advances in space and AI over the last couple of weeks that are pretty, I would say, stellar, but, you know, that's, are amazing. So... Well, just by the way, it's not obvious to me, given how knee-deep 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, I have great faith that you have great wisdom and experience in all things space and many things if not all AI. So you know, a lot of drama this past month on the whole Boeing versus SpaceX. I don't know if you've been following this, so you know, here's the situation about, I don't know, what was it here, a decade ago NASA's retiring the space shuttle and they want to put up humans in the future. And so they give out two contracts, one to steadfast Boeing and one to upstart SpaceX. And this week, the upstart is saving the steadfast Boeing. Any thoughts on this? Yeah, I never have strong opinions about what hardware ever gets used to go in and come

back from space. 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 as 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? And we know these two astronauts' names, Sunita Williams.

And is it Butch? You know, Sunita Williams and is it Butch? You know Sunita has gotten all of the publicity. It's always about bringing her back. Nobody cares about that. Is it Butch Wilmore? I forgot his first name. So Williams and Wilmore, alright, we know their names. Well, many of us knew them just because we knew them. 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, 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 stranded can you be when there are other human beings there ready to hang out with until you get rescued? 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 I were them, if I were Sunita and Butch, I'd say, oh, I have to spend longer in space? Oh, that's too bad, isn't it? I guess, let me just enjoy the rest of this time. So that's how I look at it.

You know, it's interesting. What do you think the next names that we will memorize and learn in school will happen? Is it the first people back on the moon, the first to Mars, or are we just past that party? It'll be the first to Mars for sure. Yeah, we're sure and by the way when we land people on Mars, you'll have to rename your podcast Off-the-marshots Moon shots will be oh, that's not even a big project anymore

so yeah, so that's, those are my views there. And I think NASA is pretty calm about it. It was the press that, I think we, the idea that one can be stranded in space carries a lot of clickbait along with it. I'm old enough to remember in 1969, there was a movie, Marooned. I remember it.

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. You know, Gene Hackman was in it. Greg Wepeck 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? I'm growing up in New York City. Then I realized, 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 the eye of the hurricane was gonna pass over Cape Canaveral. Ha ha.

And I said, well, why does that make a difference? Because 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 launch pad, 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 feet. 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 launch pad right now is the Polaris Dawn mission. So this is a friend, Jared Isaacman, who made his money in the financial tech world and is funding private missions to 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. Excited about this? Any thoughts on the Polaris? Just a few things maybe, it's not obvious to people, that there's a reason why launches, with great effort, launches are made as close to the Earth's equator as you can. In fact, there is a sea launch company

that would launch your satellite from the exact equator because they've just moved 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 reason for that of course is as Earth rotates

the equator is moving faster than any other latitude. It's going about a thousand miles an hour so that's an easy number to remember because the circumference of the earth is about 25,000 miles and we rotate once in 24 hours. You divide the two, you get about a thousand miles 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 thousand 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 due east. If you can 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 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. So these are good and you're going to sell seats to it. I'd want to fly over the North Pole and see, check out Santa. The only challenge is 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 I have grown up passionate about going to space. My only concern is getting too much cosmic radiation and too high a dose if I spend any

significant time up there. What elevation will they be going? Their orbit is going to peak at 700 kilometers altitude which is significantly... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's 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 box at the base of this ocean of atmosphere, protecting us not only from asteroids, otherwise we 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 that as well. So if you can 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. The trip has been delayed now by a week because of the downrange recovery location, but I think it will be on the order of five days, thereabouts, which isn't too bad.

Yeah, and so, I mean, think about it. The radiation that we're speaking of does not require all that much to be shielded. So for example, a thin layer of water will do that. And I imagine sort of long space flights, you'd have your entire water supply forming just under the skin 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 don't know if that's good or bad. Like you said, you're worried. But we do know that very, very low doses of radiation can promote longevity within you as your DNA gets mildly damaged and gets repaired 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 Conestoga wagon. It's the it's the first transatlantic. Like Conestoga. Come on, dude, it's a rocket. Give it a little more. Give it a little more. Rod, it's the it's the Connie for transatlantic flights.

What would you call it? I'm trying to go, the Pony Express. Okay, okay. Let me resonate with you here. The railroads, the railroads. When I first learned that Europe was pooling together their resources into a brand of airplane and they were going to call it the Airbus, it was like, no, no, no, no, how dare you? Okay.

And if you look at the A380, yeah, that's a big old fat bus. It's just a, we are cargo in those airplanes. And so maybe we're just, we're done with fancy words and we're just trying to move the population. All right. So, well, it's called Starship for the moment. And for me- It's not going to the stars. It's really a planet ship.

It is, it's a moonship and a planet ship. Space 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 centimeter above a schoolroom globe. But that's not to an astrophysicist, excuse me. So there's a lot of this exaggeration going on. I pulled this clip 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 exaggeration. Alright, I pulled this clip from... I'll call it Twitter for the moment, even though it's a clip by Elon. And let me play this. I found this compelling. Take a look, C. — A little super crazy. But the more you talk about it, I mean, I think, you know,

at SpaceX, we specialize in turning, converting things from impossible to late. So, but it's pretty nutty because you're going to have this gigantic booster coming back and I mean that's nine meters in diameter, not counting the chines or roughly 30 feet in diameter. And it'll weigh about 250 tons. It's been on the heavy side. We'll make that lighter over time. So that's the mechanism by which the Starship booster comes back. It lands with these giant mechanical arms being captured by the original launch pad

so it could be refueled and sent back later that day. Reused, 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 what Elon is pioneering is not what is impossible in space exploration. He's pioneering what was unrealistic in terms of price, just cost. So the engineering is getting a work over, but consider that he hasn't done anything that NASA hasn't already done. The actual space frontier is still held by NASA, right?

And so, and it remains to be shown if his new ventures have commercial support, commercial value. Because if they don't, then it's a one-off and it's a spectacle but it'll just It'll go What'll happen it'll you know? Well applaud it, but then he goes on to his other projects I'll I'll differ with you on on that. I think I think honestly, you know The space shuttle was an attempt for

So the space shuttle was an attempt for reusability. And you remember this, when it was first proposed to Congress, the space shuttle, I think, had a per-flight cost of $50 million and was supposed to fly 50 times a year. Yeah, once a week, for sure. And it ended up at a price tag of $4 billion a year, independent of how many flights it flew because it was a workforce initiative, right? So four flights a year was $4 billion a year, independent of how many flights it flew, because it was a workforce initiative, right? So four flights a year was $1 billion each. One flight a year was $4 billion a flight.

And while it reused the shuttle itself, the tank and the boosters were effectively, you know, the tank was thrown away and the boosters were refurbished, which was extraordinarily expensive. So I think what SpaceX has done is shown actual reusability of the Falcon 9. Well, I agree. These are engineering frontiers that have been breached here. So you're saying whether the markets are there? No, no, no, no. 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 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 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 people? So let's talk about that. So SpaceX just announced its first ship to Mars is gonna 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, where should we be going?

What should our vision be? So, you and I 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 could differ on this You know mark Elon was let's go to Mars directly. I think the contracts at NASA For going to the moon has swayed him to go to the moon first and then to Mars Jeff for going to the moon has swayed him to go to the moon first and then to Mars. Jeff actually is much more in the school of thought I am which came from the days of Gerard

O'Neill at Princeton which is let's go to the moon, 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'Neill colonies And you know basically large rotating kilometer long 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? Should we go to Mars and colonize that, or should we use asteroid materials and lunar materials to build habitats for large populations?

So it reminds me of a lot of commentary that I published actually in 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.

Is that really what the book is about? And the publishers said, no, you can't have the word failure and a title and delusion. No, no, we have to, and so we tidied 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 mid 1980s. I remember. I remember the reports that came out. And it was like, 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. But that if statement was, yes, that's literally true if you kept that spending.

But it was tone deaf of geopolitics. And space does not exist in a vacuum. Yes, it does actually. It does. Sorry, 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 Russkies aren't there.

And we say, we're done here. We're not going back to the moon. Stranding Apollo 18 and further mentions. Yeah, we had actually built the rockets, Apollo 18. That's why I said, stranding Apollo 18. All those rockets were built. Yeah. 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 fast forward. What happens? 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? Moon Mars Initiative.

I remember it well. No, no, no. I know. But the commission, well, is the commission on the future of the U S space exploration policy. But that was shortened to the moon, the moon and Mars commission. That's what it got shortened to. And yeah, we advised Congress of this. And then they costed it out.

And it would cost like a trillion dollars. By the way, a trillion dollars spent, the same money for NASA every year over 30 years, gets you basically a trillion dollars. So the number sounded heavy and impossible to reach, even though it was plainly laid out in front of us. So it languished, plus 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, let me get my years correct here, my presidents. Did I leave anybody out? Bush, Obama. Who came after Obama? Well, Trump came in there at some point.

I know. 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? Because, oh, China.

Oh, hang 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 geopolitics didn't force it. What happens? China says, we're gonna put astronauts on the moon. All right. They just come shy of saying we're gonna put military bases on them. We're gonna 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 it, and by the way, all of a sudden, it's the right thing for us to do. And I want to tell you this, based on my read of it.

And by the way, all of this is in the book. It's all in the book. Everything I'm telling you now is written, done, and I'm ready to talk about something else. But I'm telling you that if Elon's ships will ever fly to Mars, it's because China says, I'm making this up, but let any of them say we want to put military bases on Mars But I mean 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 on his initiative. I get it, but I'm gonna disagree in part here, because the fact of the matter is Starship has been built on his dime. It's been built on- No, but it has been launched.

Yes, because it's been- It's been launched three times, not successfully. Not to Mars, but the the capability once it working has the capability of refueling and going and I hope that NASA does what I'm telling you is yeah what I'm telling you all there what I'm saying is that as a Mars program the cost of that goes beyond any venture capitalists 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. You know what's going to unfold. And 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 with a one off vanity project. Well, that's what it was.

Listen, a lot of times I have a problem with that. You know, just saying don't tell me it's a business case. No, it's not a business case. By no means. This is a backup humanity vision for him. Now, that wasn't the conversation I wanted to have with you, because I'm not a huge Mars fan. I mean, I love the idea of going to Mars and finding the life that's subsoil there. Me too. By the way, this idea that it's Mars, the idea that it's Earth 2.0 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, 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 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'Neill painted of large cylinders built from astronaut materials, that at this point built by robotics and AI autonomously without humans in the loop,

sort of creating ideal environments for us to go into 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 say some supportive things of what you just said. The Gerard Keio Neo model as you noted has the advantage that you park one of these at a Lagrangian 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 lower G as you would have on the moon, as you would have on Mars, which is those kinds of challenges were thoroughly explored in the TV series sci-fi story, Expanse. If you look at any Expanse episodes, there are the people who live on Mars, there are people who 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 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 that have thought about this. It's completely bypassed when you have a rotating system

So the question would be How idyllic 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 do foresee One way missions. In fact, I you know, I've done this in the lecture halls at universities typically for 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 that responsibility is the percentage of hands that 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 hands that go up in the audience is pretty large, close to 50%. By the way, there was the project Mars One. Do you remember that? Yes, I do remember. That one's 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 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 we had I had Baz Lundrup on podcast, it's in our archives, and the, 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, so you really want to go one way on this trip?

And he said, and he said, yes. And I said, aren't you married? And he said, yes. Well, what is, I said, what does your wife say about this and he said oh she's encouraged it you don't understand what's going on in your marriage good riddance good riddance so yeah I get that but and maybe Elon with his you you know, starship is that's a first step. But to say we will have robotic AI, mining asteroids, building colonies, enough for all of us to move there and live there. On what time scale are you imagining this? By the way, George K. O'Neill imagined all of this by the 21st century.

Yeah, he wrote his books in the mid late 80s. And so I think it was earlier. Oh, High Frontier was earlier, was in the mid 70s. You're right. He wrote two thousand eighty four, which is his follow on. I mean, I see this occurring in the next 30 years, which might be completely ridiculous on your time scale, but I think that the abilities to do this will be there.

By the 30 years ago was 1994. Yes. Just to put your predictions in context. But we are on a nonlinear curve, I would say. Yes, we are. We'd love to talk about that. It's part of your professional identity to be on that exponential. We'd love to talk about that. All right. It's part of your professional identity to be on that exponential.

I mean, you made a career out of that. I did. So I applaud you for this. Thank you. By the way. But space has been heretofore slow, risk averse, and government driven. Slower 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 you look at the future that never was, everyone's visions of the future, 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 economy, transportation-driven economy, and everything we have in our information world, nobody foresaw, okay, even the best of the futurists. So, okay, I mean, they forsook pieces. So, okay, I mean, there's four pieces of it, okay? But, so our advances are not 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 because of the will and because of the you know, the 400,000 Americans that joined the Apollo program in one shape or form and engineers and scientists engineers scientists Politicians 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 new material sciences.

We have a whole slew of technologies that, if we need it to go faster, and I think 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 companies employed during peacetime

That's the way I think about it and it's not about That's a a More cynical view which which I'm not I'm not typically cynical but I get that you're definitely not a cynical guy So if I think you went cynic there that says something and I and I'm not even gonna argue that what I will say however, there is NASA with all the the pyramid of below it that has to be all the moving parts that run 10 NASA centers

and all the rest of the machinery that NASA is, it continues to be the singular agency that is at the frontier of space exploration. And it's not clear that that will be replaced by commercial space exploration, because the act of 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 shoulders

of geopolitics rather than on private enterprise. What happens is private enterprise comes later and then they do it more cheaply. But they're not gonna be the first to, 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 what the rules are, right? Because everything we hold a 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. 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, fair enough. I don't see evidence of that. I'm not wishing this were the case. I'm simply declaring

that my observation of the delusions of space enthusiasts of the past 65 years tells me that 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 understand the incentive business very well. Yeah, 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. It's how we met. Was it 35 years ago? 40 years ago? It was 30 years ago. And just to tell that story, I had just come up with the idea of the X-Prize, the first one for space flight.

Like minutes before you knocked on my door. And yes, literally. And I read in the back of the science fiction Penguin books that there were these tearout 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 submit it to the Hayden Planetarium And so I was recently appointed as chair. Yes, so I'm 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 XPRIZE for space flight and that was from the 1950s 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 Dr. Tyson, do you happen to have a database of all the people who signed up for this? Because I like to- It's like a bin of archives of everyone who signed up. Yeah.

So it turns out we were able to recover a small box of them. It was a- you pulled out a shoe box. Yeah, it was a shoe box. Yeah, it was a shoe box. I didn't know anything about it, right? So that was a clever sort of ploy, but you know, that's back when addresses didn't even have zip codes. Naive. Naive I was.

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story? No, I'm not, but we expect that. Mars clearly, if you look at its surface today, there's no end of visual evidence of there once having been running water. They're meandering riverbeds, river deltas, floodplains, all the telltale signs of erosion caused by slowly flowing water and rapidly flowing water. And Mars is bone dry today. Have to ask where did the water go? And the bedding person's suggestion was that it was sunken beneath the surface as a permafrost.

And you just have to go down there and 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 for the search for life. Because everywhere on Earth where we find liquid water, we find life, including the Dead Sea. They don't call it the Dead Sea because whoever named it didn't have a microscope. I'm gonna put on your your betting man's hat. So, probability that there is life of any type on Mars today. Where do you put that? Today, that's a little harder.

Whether it was once life. Sure, life got started on Earth pretty quickly within about 100 billion years of the earliest moment it possibly could have formed. And that's not very, did I say 100 billion? Sorry, 100 million years. That's a very short interval of time compared with the Earth. About half a billion years after the Earth was formed, right? So four and a half billion years ago.

Yeah, so. So. About four billion years ago. You know, 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 fair 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, the 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, as a betting man, that life exists, subsurface, permafrost? Maybe 50-50 microbial life, definitely nothing more complex than that. Because you can't be highly complex life and navigating rocks inside the rocks and we can't call it soil because it's not soil. But the regolith of Mars, you have to be small enough to be able to make that your home and

that would be microbial life. So I would have maybe 50-50 microbial life, but I don't think anything more complex than that. Now, the next question is, we know that ejecta from asteroid impacts on the Martian surface reaches the Earth. And the lunar surface as well. And the lunar surface. 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 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 painting. I'll do that. But 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 will cool.

So a small potato will cool faster than a big potato after you pull them out of the oven. Oh, I remember that. So Mars is one tenth our mass, something like that. And, you know, one, what is it, one third, one half, one two and a half our size. And so you, 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, as crazy as that idea sounds, it's completely plausible. 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 an active early period of Earth's solar system where 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, spawning life on Earth. Now, very important here, many people misunderstand evolution. 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 of a species, there's variation, typically, 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. Adaptation sounds like it's an active thing that you are doing on purpose. That's not how any of this works. I say this because the rock going through space where there is no water, there is high radiation, there's high temperature

coming out and landing and there's cold temperature and all of these are forces operating on all the microbes Most microbes will die if any microbe 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. Mm-hmm It's microscopic you can't kill this thing Okay, it's you can irradiate 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. The ultimate astronaut. 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 vents and deep in the ocean at the point of volcanic eruptions.

We see things in the coldest places on earth. So life does- Well, that's a reminder that unlike how we, you and I learned biology in our textbooks, you don't need the 72 degree tide pool, 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 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 microbes just doing the backstroke because 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, the two scenarios... When we go to Mars? When we go to Mars?

Mr. Optimistic Man. Oh, come on. 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 it of us. I think otherwise, we need one more.

You and I will continue to differ on that point. Yeah, but I have the evidence of history on my side. You have wishful thinking on your side. That's the difference here. That's all I'm saying. We have individual explorers who have charted paths. Yeah, but going to Mars is not an individual explorer. That's a trillion dollars right there. A trillion dollars. Hundreds of billions of dollars.

That's not private money making that happen. So this next topic here, 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 are you so glum? And he goes, just figure it 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

moon Mars initiative, but how do you fund this thing? Starlink is his venture to fund this thing. How do you get a trillion dollars in value? You plug into a large consumer base 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 note. So he's got... I know, I know. Well, you know, the idea of communicating over Starlink is pretty cool. But it's- Okay, so I was recently on a ship, 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, Starlink's greatest value is where you don't otherwise have typical cell phone communications. So we can ask the very simple question, how many people will be served by Starlink 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? Yeah, sorry at high or high elevation. Yes So so again you are a connective back up for a minute you mentioned President Kennedy 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 more fleshed out with the idea of going to the moon.

But that original speech, which we remember, you know, we will put a man on the moon before the decade is out and return safely to Earth, this sort of thing. You can even hear his Brookline, Massachusetts accent saying it, right? That's how resonant those words are in so many of thing. You can even hear his Brookline Massachusetts accent saying it, right? 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, oh, we had leaders back then with visionaries. And then, excuse me, excuse me, go back a few paragraphs in that speech. Oh, nobody does that. 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 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. So if the events of recent, 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 battle cry 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 were scared witless that the godless communist would get the new high ground. So let's be honest with ourselves, 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, I still believe we have moved from the era where only governments 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 robber barons, the only person who could possibly, you know, change the world and today individuals are and that will always be my my belief.

Well, the individual 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 book you know always changed the world. So I don't want to under-celebrate that fact. But there is a different, there's a different book you have. But individuals don't run around with a trillion dollars and they just spend it all. They change the world with their views, with their spirit energy to convince people that some things we should be doing collectively. Well, you know, let's look at the railroads, let's look at the oil industry. Well, you know, let's look at the railroads. Let's look at the oil industry.

But they, you know, they were underwritten by the Rockefellers and such. Yes, there was economic engines there and there need to be economic engines. Excuse me, who protected the railroads? It was the US cavalry. Excuse me. Just the government was totally in that. You sound like Newt Gingrich, who was a very big railroad analogist. Where he said, if we'd given them NASA's money to private enterprise, we would have

been on the moon 10 times over. But no, no, there's complete economic value to land that you're going to take from the Indians. This was the entire movement and farmland and minerals. And so did not. And now it is. I understand the need for a boogeyman to use that term. There is another one out there.

You know, many years ago, I flew Stephen Hawking into Zero G. Do you remember that? I didn't know you were part of that, but I did know he was. He was Zero G. Yeah. Thanks for doing that. That was, you know, he needed to do that but I did know he was zero G. Yes I'm doing that that was you know, he

That's he needed to do that. Yeah, it was it was my company zero gravity corporation We fly these parabolic flights and it's another you know overnight success after 11 years of hard work started in 93 Finally, I didn't cost you a trillion dollars. It's a lot cost you a lot of money, but not a trillion dollars. Go on. So in 2006, after the Ansari X-Prize was won, it was won in 2004, but two years later, I find myself on the phone with Professor Hawking on his computer and with his administrative assistant slash 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 zero-G. 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, his lungs, his ribs, you know, how...we had a whole emergency room medical center on the flight. And in the pre-flight press conference, he was asked the question. You don't want headlines, Peter DeMondis kills... World famous, yes, yes. That was...

Bad PR for zero chief. Believe me, I had the FAA telling me I could not make... I was disallowed from doing the flight after I'd spent 11 years. And 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 guess a flight doc or his physicians. I said, great.

I bought malpractice for those individuals, got them to write letters to the FAA that he was able-bodied to fly G and they basically said it's your ass Good luck. That's right, but they got their paperwork. So they're covered by exactly So long story short We're at the pre-flight press conference and he's asked. Why are you doing this and he goes? Given all the paraphrasing at all the human race has a future unless we 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

the human race is. It's not a clear and present danger on the top of people's minds. It'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 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? In case the Earth should be, or humanity should be wiped out by some existential threat. Such as? Give me your top three. Asteroid approaching us from the sun before we had a chance to see it, nuclear Armageddon, a well-engineered killer virus pandemic. Okay. So, those, everything you just said makes complete sense and makes perfectly readable

headlines. Yes. With all your eggs in one basket, everyone understands that principle. OK. 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 seems to me to be more effort than finding all dangerous asteroids and deflecting them. Just seems to me. I'm just, it just, it just, it just, Just saying. I'm just spit balling here, okay? It seems to me that if we trash Earth with climate change

and, and what, or there's some 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 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 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 how many people are there? Let's begin. I'm not saying a billion and I'm not a Mars fan.

Okay, whatever is the number. But I am. You're going to have to terraform Mars, like Elon wants to do. Yeah, well, or we need to back up some significant population off of planet. Now listen, I have read maybe too many science fiction books and looking for rationale to fund our space programs. But you know, we are thousands of years from now, millions of years from 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 is the first creature to... Move out of the oceans onto land. Yes. So I think that is in our, it's not a genotype, it is a phenotype of humans to desire to explore. Yeah, I agree.

By the way, you're mixing two highly separable variables there. One of them is we want to go to Mars because it's cool and we're going to explore and we're going to be the lungfish leaving Earth going to Mars. 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 saying that. I'm just saying- This is-

It's the consequence of what you're saying. This is insurance policies. This is insurance policies. This is That's what I utter I uttered the insurance policy for the species I'm saying by the time we can do that on Mars all 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 They'll have the ability to do this. I sure hope so.

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We've seen hearings in Congress a number of hearings about UFOs I'm curious. I mean you must been asked over and over again, what do you think of these? Seems like super credible individuals who are bringing forward what they believe as viable evidence for these unidentified flying objects. They're not even called UFOs anymore, are they? They're called something else. UAPs. Yeah. UAPs. Unidentified flying objects. They're not even called UFOs anymore, are they? They're called something else. The UAPs, yeah. UAPs. Unidentified, Paranormal.

Anomalous phenomenon. Okay. Yeah, who are they kidding? They mean UFOs. Yeah. They're just trying to rebrand it to get rid of the giggle factor. So yeah, the government calls them UAPs.

So, and I noticed that the News Nation is saying, forget the UAP, we want's go back to what everyone knows what these are. So you wanna know, I think they're interesting mysteries. I don't have any problem investigating mysteries. But if you wanna 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. 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 Webb 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 the capacity to crowdsource that phenomenon. Cat videos go viral overnight. If you get any picture of an alien, or there's spaceship, that 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 looking for them.

I don't wanna stop people's enthusiasm for this. I don't know what that is, go figure it out. But 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 non-human biologics in a lock box in the back. And I take people at their word, 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 lockbox for all I know based on that kind of testimony. Neil, I want to switch us over to another subject that is making the headlines heavily and it's AI. How do you feel about AI safety? What

are your thoughts? Are you concerned about the speed at which AI is progressing? I'm not uniquely concerned about AI 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. 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 examples of what would be just right. So this week, California legislature approves a bill with sweeping AI restrictions. I find, you know, listen, safety standards requiring large-scale AI

companies undergo safety testing before deployment. Fantastic. In fact, OpenAI and Anthropic have volunteered to do this. Transparency, great. But this is interesting. Worker protections, protecting workers and call centers from being replaced by AI.

That would be right for Republicans to argue against. That's like raw meat for a Republican. That I think is naive. That would be like passing a law saying we have to protect all auto workers from these bots that are now assembling our cars. 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 certain, that looks a little naive to me. And 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 showing a movie to my son from the movie was from like the 70s and the bad guys 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, you can't think that, why would a car not start? Of course it's gonna start. It's a machine that works perfectly, right? So cars are lighter, faster, better, more fuel efficient than they've ever been and all made by robots. So we have to, one has to think about,

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 strikes that happened, was it a year ago, just coming out of COVID, part of those arguments,

and I'm a member of SAG-AFTRA, the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Radio and Television Artists. The two unions had joined together, because I had some cameos, not that I'm a big time actor, of course I'm not, that 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 one of their concerns was they don't want a movie studio that has access to 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? And I have staff writers that wrote them all.

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 ask you because this is interesting, right? The disruption of the hegemony of Hollywood is coming because we're not far 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 celebrities that's what cartoons are but when they become when they become lifelike, or we're gonna bring back Merlin Monroe and Carrie Carrey. But those are animated cartoons. They're animated movies. Disney created The Lion King.

So what's your point? Somebody gets money for the voice. Okay, of course that was James Earl Jones, okay? As Mufasa. But the character, Disney owns the characters. So what's different to you about this? Only that they are photo-realistic human characters that would obviate the need for actors at some point in the future. Okay, so I wonder if, that's an interesting future, 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 with? You know if you're not an actual living thing is that lifestyles of the rich and famous that will that Will anyone have any interest at all I bet not So let's take a look at this. This is out of Slides here. This is fascinating for me. So let's check this out here. So the ability of AI to create effectively total disinformation, right? So do you imagine we're gonna head towards a future of defaulting to disbelief? Yes, yes.

In fact, I foresee, so my big prediction here, I predict that we are within five years, well that's possibly three, of an internet where the deep fakes are so good that even people who believed that fake news was real will no longer believe the fake news. Okay, think about it. Think about it. We're defaulting to disbelief. It'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 people think the fakes are fakes the day that happens Will represent an implosion of information integrity of the entire internet. And that will 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. things like that. I think that is the future. Yeah and it'll be its own fault, right? Or with the rules and regulations, it will be a crime to have a deep fake that is not otherwise watermarked as such. Counterfeiting. You're found out and 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 rein 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 synolytic that kills senile 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. 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 the humanoid robot wars? I'm not into humanoid robots I think it's a waste of time really I won't tell other people to waste 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 you're what your opinion is here so why do you why do you think that's a waste of time so thank you thank you Peter 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. in elementary school, my teacher saying, oh, the human body is so well designed and the feet are all the, every bone in the right place and tendon and ligament, 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 short-sighted. Because if you want to get tasks done, to have a human do the task, no, no. Remember the Jetsons?

Okay, the Jetsons, remember, oh, by the way, 2022, that year, all evidence shows that that's the year George Jetson was born. I'm sharing that with you. And that was the year of Soylent Green took place. Interesting. But in the Jetsons, 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 middle man. Take out the middle bot. And the car is the robot. And you know something? It's in the shape of a car because that's what you needed to do. Well, this hunt to get a, I don't, I'm 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 we are running a global hundred and five hundred and ten trillion dollar GDP. And right now, half that GDP is labor and it's human labor. The projections that, you know, I showed you that image of the three top robot companies domestically are, you know, one X and Optimus by Tesla and figure two by figure. Their price point is longer in the running there japan No, there are there are about 30 well-funded humanoid 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 and China's also got the issue of an aging population without, you know, it's one child policy basically left half the grandparents without a kid to take care of them. With the bit of them in the ass, yeah. Yeah. So these robots, there's Unitree out of China, which is a sixteen thousand dollar robot So the the numbers right now are trending towards a twenty thousand dollar price tag for one of these robots

If you look at it on a price per kilogram, which you know, I think is a reliably let's call it $40,000 per robot so you're able to rent or lease a robot for $100 $200 per month 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 If these robots are multi are driven by multimodal AI that are just helping around. The projections right now may be off, but you know, on the order of by 2040, somewhere between one to ten billion humanoid robots on the planet. That means as many humanoid robots as humans. Yes. That would

be more than, you know, Elon's predictions and God knows he's not always right, but he thinks more prevalent than cars on the planet. But having one of these sort of multimodal, full utility capabilities that gives your AI arms and legs to do things, right, like, please take care of everything in the house, go shopping, go get these things for me. The one thing that we humans all have in common is 24 hours in a day, seven 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, save time by hopping on a private jet. So I think these are time savers and the ability to make yourself multi-present. 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 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? 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. It's a universal interface. allows you to do everything without redesigning everything. Yeah, no, I get that.

It's universal interface. But, finally, designs change, right? So, yeah, I agree. But we're not gonna not design everything forever, all right? So, I'm gonna say I don't want a robot. I'm gonna find a way, I'm gonna design my home so that I don't need the robot, okay? I'm gonna design my home so that I don't,

I'm gonna 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 ultimately not need humanoid robots. Because you're going to build a thing that is itself a robot and it doesn't look anything like a human. Well, we call everything that be that works like this We called the robot that cleans dishes dishwasher We give it we give it a name you're gonna get a robot to load the dishwasher are you that fucking lazy Probably

Remember on the Jetsons the the maid, I forgot her name. Yeah, Rosie. Rosie. Rosie, of course. Rosie, you know, she wore a little maid's apron. You know? Neil, you've got a new book coming out in a few weeks. Tell me about it.

I think you've given it a shout out. No. Yeah. So it's, oh my gosh, this is, I almost well up when I comment on this. This is emotional. This is deep. Well, a little bit, a little bit, a little bit of 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 asked 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 dialogue between the two of them as the reply to that question. And 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, it's called Merlin's tour of the universe. And my brother illustrated it. So he's an artist. And there's and there's sort of playful, fun, irreverent illustrations throughout. Does he does he do this one as well? 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 mean, I well up a little bit because re inhabiting 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 terse where necessary and witty and a little bit irreverent,

and the answers are mostly short. And I realized that was my proving ground for my postings on Twitter. Okay. It was like I was being honed for the short form commentary on the world. You're just ahead of your time. It was coming out the end of October, Merlin's tour of the universe. Yeah.

And I just checked and you can pre-buy 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 on it. So who is it for, by the way? Who did you write it for originally and now? Oh, no, no, I mean, 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 of questions. And curiosity, yeah. Yeah, and curiosity. Retired people who were lifelong learners, but there's some very young people where the question was asked by the parent. One of them was, apparently a four-year-old asked this

via the mother. It was, if rain can make rainbows, then can a moon make moonbows? Something like that, right? It's a cute little thing. And there's also, sometimes Merlin is prone to rhyme. All right, so if rhyming gives a better answer than otherwise, so can I share one with you? Please, I'd love to.

It's the first time I'm talking about this. Yeah, I love love to. It's the first time I'm talking about this. Yeah, I love it. In any platform, first time I'm talking about it. So you get it first here. Thank you. Someone asked, dear Merlin, are red stars red because they're hotter than blue stars? Okay, that's a perfectly rational question.

And so rather than just say yes or no, so Merlin just fleshes it out a bit. So here it goes. 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. Oh, wow. The challenge there was making it astrophysically accurate. You're having your career my friend. So blue hot is the hottest of all

hot. Yes. As welders know for example. 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 all the Clint.

Marlon Tour of the Universe. On your favorite book purchasing. Do you read the book as well? Are you reading? For Audible. Are you gonna have Audible? Are you going to? Oh, thank you. Yes, yes, yes. In fact, the company that's publishing the printed book, cut their teeth as an audio book company called Blackstone Publishers. And so, yes, I read all the answers, but we got voice actors to be the people asking the questions.

That's great. When Merlin has a conversation with Isaac Newton, we got to get a Brit in there with the Isaac Newton accent. So the conversations are split up that way. One last topic before we jump. We're gonna be seeing each other again in about a month's time. I look forward to on my calendar. I look forward to that. Yeah, this is the 30th anniversary of the X-Prize, which we spoke about when you and I met some 30 years ago. And you're going to be on stage live with me

and we'll be recording this podcast. Let your audience know I've not gotten an invitation until now, and you've been doing this for 29 years. That's what you wanted me to know. I wanted to make it super special for you, my friend. And 30 years is an interesting interval of time. 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 Starry 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 five years earlier, 10 years, I was not wise enough to bring pen to page for what's in that book. One of the chapters is, oh, by the way, so it's what civilization looks like if you're 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 right. But because what does a

scientist do, but load up all the evidence and let the evidence do the talking. But if you do the talking, instead of instead of the evidence you're gonna 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. Thirty 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 a big point that I make is that almost every prediction made at the beginning of a 30-year period just comes out wrong. You 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 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 steams ship coming onto shore, because steam ships in 1900 was the way to go crossing the Atlantic. The rage. 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 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 dirigibles 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 do a deep dive into what people are doing at the beginning and at the end of these intervals and it's freaking mind blowing 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. One last thing, I quote a guy from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in the year 1900. He works for the New York Central Railroad. So he's in the world of transportation. And by the way, what's going on in 1900? The internal combustion engine car was just invented the the the modern bicycle took Final form the the country is crisscrossed with railroad steamships dirigibles. 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.

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 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 realm. Digital information. And you're a future man. If there's a future man walking this earth, it's you. Okay?

Thank you, my friend. Because 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. Where do people find you? Obviously, StarTalk, if you have not yet listened to star podcast. Yes, our talk is yeah

We we it's it's it's how long has it been going on? It's been oh, yeah since 2009 so it's nice. You're the earliest podcast out there. It's one of the earliest in fact We were terrestrial radio before we were Before podcasts were a thing. We also have a stint on television before Disney bought National Geographic. We were on National Geographic television. And so there are episodes that are there, 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 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 that's the right mixture for everybody at all times. And I see you on X occasionally on Twitter. Yeah, I've been posting to X less often.

Yeah. What's been, you know, the algorithms have changed. I have a huge following on X. 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,

because we're now clipping the podcast and posting them on TikTok and Instagram. So X 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. Thank you. But just to be clear, so I'm Neil deGrasse 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 Twitter at X. But Neil deGrasse Tyson everywhere else. And the podcast is StarTalk. So thanks for those shout outs. Of course, buddy. I look forward to seeing you on the stage at X-Prize Visioneering the end of October and thank you for joining me my friend. Great to see you.