Speaker 1: Okay, guys, here are my dates for the High and
Speaker 1: Mighty Tour. In June, i will be in Saratoga Springs,
Speaker 1: New York, port Chester, New York. I'm coming to Boston
Speaker 1: at the Wang Theater. I'll be in Portland, Oregon, Seattle,
Speaker 1: and then Hyannis, Massachusetts, and then two shows in Nantucket.
Speaker 1: In August, you can find me in Red Bank, New Jersey, Montclair,
Speaker 1: New Jersey, and Calgary. That's Canada. And September I will
Speaker 1: be in Santa Barbara, San Diego, New York City, Philly,
Speaker 1: and New Haven, Connecticut. October is Atlanta, Baltimore, Saginaw, Michigan, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Boise, Idaho,
Speaker 1: and Spokane. And then in November I'll be in San Francisco.
Speaker 1: I'm coming to Salt Lake City, Austin, Houston, Dallas, Babies,
Speaker 1: I'll be there. And then in December, I am closing
Speaker 1: out my tour in Denver and Vancouver. So get your
Speaker 1: tickets at Chelseahandler dot com for the High and Mighty Tour.
Speaker 1: Hi Catherine, Hi Chelsea. It's almost Thursday. It's our podcast
Speaker 1: is Thursday.
Speaker 2: I have to tell you, I don't know if anyone
Speaker 2: can hear in the background.
Speaker 1: That's my new dog. That's my new dog, ray J.
Speaker 1: I have to tell you hist as usual.
Speaker 2: I asked you, like, oh, why did you pick ray
Speaker 2: J for the name? And Brad later that night, like
Speaker 2: ten pm, was like in the other room, he texted me,
Speaker 2: he goes. Just so you know, ray J is a rapper.
Speaker 1: I'm famil. I saw this dog and I'm like, that's rage.
Speaker 1: That dog reminds me of the name. It's a perfect name. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is. It is.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 2: Our guest today is a very exciting one.
Speaker 1: Okay is an astrophysicist, best selling author, host of Star Talk,
Speaker 1: and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum
Speaker 1: of Natural History. Please welcome Neil de grasse Tyson. Oh
Speaker 1: lovely we Neil.
Speaker 3: Hello, this is your babe. Cave here is.
Speaker 1: That the babe?
Speaker 3: This sounds better than a man cave?
Speaker 1: No, that does sound like? That does sound better? We
Speaker 1: need we need something like that.
Speaker 3: All parts of you up there on the wall.
Speaker 1: We do. When was the last time I'm going to
Speaker 1: take some medication? Since you're here, so you waited when
Speaker 1: I'm doing it's nothing too exciting, Otherwise I'd be happy
Speaker 1: to share when was the last time I saw you?
Speaker 3: I was on your show.
Speaker 1: It was the Netflix show was the last time, but before.
Speaker 3: That lately seen. I don't think i've seen you since then.
Speaker 1: No, no, I would have been the Netflix show was
Speaker 1: the last time, but we have I interviewed you before
Speaker 1: then also, I think so and Chelsea lately.
Speaker 3: But but it's been too long, pre covid BC, before COVID.
Speaker 1: How did COVID treat you?
Speaker 3: I was novid until like a couple of octobers ago.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I didn't get it at all. Yeah, you
Speaker 3: know I want to do that too, can I do?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Chris Cross Applesauce get into it. That you could
Speaker 1: get into this position. That's pretty impressive for a man. Oh,
Speaker 1: Neil de grass Tyson. Look at this, Let's see how
Speaker 1: it needs it? Do you need a pillow to secure
Speaker 1: the area?
Speaker 3: Need?
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, we'll do it. We'll do it with you.
Speaker 3: Look, we're all sitting like I was a performing a
Speaker 3: member of three different dance companies.
Speaker 1: I did not know that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there's nothing like being in dance shape because
Speaker 3: you're nimble and strong and flexible, and so I would
Speaker 3: just fold up whoever I was and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I'm glad to see it's still working.
Speaker 3: Doesn't come.
Speaker 1: Well, that's okay. I think you're doing a good job.
Speaker 3: It's good, but it's a couch for that purpose.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it is. Congratulations on your new book. It's
Speaker 1: called Take Me to Your Leader, Perspectives on your First
Speaker 1: Alien Encounter. When is this going to happen?
Speaker 3: I can't wait? Well, I mean it's overdue.
Speaker 1: First of all, there's really I mean everything used. I'm
Speaker 1: fascinated by you as i've always been because I don't
Speaker 1: understand anything that you understand. I know you're an astrophysicist,
Speaker 1: but you also are You are able. You have a
Speaker 1: nice knack for kind of explaining to a layman.
Speaker 3: What I try. I mean, I'm an educator, so any
Speaker 3: educator should have some kind of knack. Otherwise they're just
Speaker 3: a pontificate. They're lecturing rather than educating.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 3: You can lecture, and if people paying attention, maybe that's okay.
Speaker 3: But consider that after college, any time someone lectures to you,
Speaker 3: you say, no, stop lecturing me. You're lecturing me. It's
Speaker 3: a bad thing after college because I think it implies
Speaker 3: that that you have to meet them all the way
Speaker 3: where they are to learn what they're trying to teach you.
Speaker 3: But I think if you're a real educator, you think
Speaker 3: about what's going on in the brains of the person
Speaker 3: who you're talking to, and you should be taking the
Speaker 3: biggest journey to them.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, that's what you do in this book,
Speaker 1: is you try to take on the perspective of alien
Speaker 1: invaders and all the different realms of possibility that those
Speaker 1: kids they could choose to arrive in.
Speaker 3: It's a love letter to our fascination with aliens, That's
Speaker 3: really what that is.
Speaker 1: And to our assumptions about aliens.
Speaker 3: I just want to challenge some assumptions. One of the
Speaker 3: biggest assumption is that it looks humanoid. Right, you know,
Speaker 3: most life on Earth does not look human, and we
Speaker 3: have DNA in common with it. I talk about bananas, yes, okay,
Speaker 3: that we have between twenty twenty five percent identical DNA
Speaker 3: with a banana. So I'm thinking an alien coming from
Speaker 3: another planet should be it either has no DNA in
Speaker 3: common with us or no DNA at all. Right, Who
Speaker 3: says DNA is the molecule universe, right, right, So it
Speaker 3: should look at least as different from us as we
Speaker 3: and bananas look from each other.
Speaker 2: Do you think about anything that's on the bottom of
Speaker 2: the ocean, like that's where.
Speaker 3: It looks alien? And I got it. I got one
Speaker 3: for you. Maybe I'm jumping ahead. I don't know what
Speaker 3: your agenda is here. But let's suppose only a few
Speaker 3: dozen people had ever seen an octopus. Just picture of this,
Speaker 3: and now they testify in front of Congress under oath
Speaker 3: you gotta believe me. There's this squishy thing in the ocean.
Speaker 3: It's this big. It has eight legs, and each leg
Speaker 3: has suction cups on it, and it's got big eyeballs,
Speaker 3: and it's really smart, and it could change its surface
Speaker 3: pattern to blend in to disappear in its environment, and
Speaker 3: it's you just say this, They'll look at you like, okay,
Speaker 3: draw it. And no one can draw these things, right,
Speaker 3: So if you look at the drawing, it's like what
Speaker 3: And so they would parade forward, and until someone brings
Speaker 3: forth an octopus, it will always be about do you
Speaker 3: believe in octopuses? But to believe in them? Do you
Speaker 3: believe those testimonies? Do you believe it? So I'm saying
Speaker 3: now that high ranking people have said they've got aliens
Speaker 3: in the back forty or in the shed? Is it
Speaker 3: too much to ask them to bring out the alien.
Speaker 1: To say that an octopus isn't an alien?
Speaker 3: Well yeah, well because we can check the DNA, so it's.
Speaker 1: Of this earth. So based on an octopus's DNA, it's
Speaker 1: of this planet. So we know it's not correct correct.
Speaker 3: So that's that's a good check.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's a good check. That's good to know. Like,
Speaker 1: and you open this book talking about bananas and chimpanzees,
Speaker 1: about our DNA make up with chimpanzee. Yeah, it's almost
Speaker 1: basically the same thing. Yes, Yes, what's the difference.
Speaker 3: A chimp is perfectly comfortable sitting as we are, you know,
Speaker 3: resting an elbow, you know, looking around, and they like
Speaker 3: bananas just the way we do. It's ninety eight plus
Speaker 3: percent identical DNA. And what is Here's what we say,
Speaker 3: here's what we tell ourselves. We say, well, the chip,
Speaker 3: a smart chimp does what they can stack boxes and
Speaker 3: reach a banana suspended from the ceiling. That's a smart
Speaker 3: chimp can do that. And whereas we have poetry and
Speaker 3: philosophy and science and art and the James Web Space telescope.
Speaker 3: So if you're prone to think highly of us as
Speaker 3: a species. You'll say, what a difference that makes? But
Speaker 3: I pose the thought experiment in the book. Imagine an
Speaker 3: alien species that's that two percent different from us that
Speaker 3: we are from chimps, just in the same vector. Just
Speaker 3: put them up there.
Speaker 1: It doesn't that wouldn't that have the same DNA too?
Speaker 1: If you're saying, I know, I know.
Speaker 3: So it's hard. It's a thought experiment. It's whatever it
Speaker 3: is that separates us from chimp containing that two percent,
Speaker 3: give that same separation to some other species. However that
Speaker 3: separation can be manifested. What would we look like to them?
Speaker 3: We would be squawking idiots in their presence, just the way.
Speaker 3: I don't call it chimp an idiot. But a chimp
Speaker 3: is not doing long division, all right. A chimp is
Speaker 3: not building, you know, skyscrapers, or airplanes, or farms or
Speaker 3: lithium farms. So very good lithium farm that could be
Speaker 3: in our future. So so that's only two percent. What
Speaker 3: would a five percent difference be. So when we have
Speaker 3: the audacity to say, let's go out in the universe
Speaker 3: and find other intelligent life, that presumes we're intelligent, well,
Speaker 3: who said we're intelligent, We didn't, Okay, so yeah, think
Speaker 3: about that one. So would an alien consider us to
Speaker 3: be intelligent if we are today what chimps are to us?
Speaker 3: And so I just it's an important thought experiment. The
Speaker 3: alien should be way smarter than us.
Speaker 1: Well, also with the argument that you is also in
Speaker 1: the book, they're the ones that are visiting us. We're
Speaker 1: not visiting them.
Speaker 3: So they got here and we only just weeks ago
Speaker 3: left low Earth orbit for the first time in fifty
Speaker 3: six years. So yeah, if they visit us, they're going
Speaker 3: to be smarter, they have better technology, might even be
Speaker 3: better looking.
Speaker 1: And they might have no I mean, and we have
Speaker 1: no idea how many. First of all, let's go to basics.
Speaker 1: First of all, can you define what a light year is?
Speaker 1: Just for light?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so yeah, it's not not a year with fewer calories. No,
Speaker 3: a light year. It's a convenient unit of distance to
Speaker 3: talk about how far away something is. So the nearest
Speaker 3: star system to the Sun is four light years away.
Speaker 3: Just turn on a beam of light. Four years later
Speaker 3: the light arrives at that location and light is very fast,
Speaker 3: And that's.
Speaker 1: Kind of like when you see a shooting star the
Speaker 1: same thing. Right.
Speaker 3: Oh, no, shooting stars are in our own atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Okay, so light years not in our atmosphere.
Speaker 3: No, no, shooting stars are not actually stars, that's the problem.
Speaker 3: They're just it's particles of dirt and meteoroid. We call
Speaker 3: them meteoroids that they're the size of a pee typically,
Speaker 3: but they slam into Earth at ten miles per second
Speaker 3: and they just burn up in our atmosphere. That's the
Speaker 3: streak of light you see. Some are big. They'll make
Speaker 3: it all the way down and if you find.
Speaker 1: It, make it all the way down to Earth surface.
Speaker 1: Oh okay.
Speaker 3: And if you find on the Earth surface, then it's
Speaker 3: so I see its streak. It's a meteor. It hits
Speaker 3: the ground meteorite.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, no, no, I don't know anything about
Speaker 1: any of this stuff. So if it hits the atmosphere,
Speaker 1: then meteor And then if it hits the actual land
Speaker 1: of Earth, meteor right, okay, got that? Oh that's good.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And really big ones, the really big ones don't
Speaker 3: really get burnt up at all, and they'll leave a
Speaker 3: big crater. So when Arizona has a huge crater that
Speaker 3: was left by a meteor, uh, fifty years ago.
Speaker 2: Oh, hey, have you been thinking about writing into Dear Chelsea. Well,
Speaker 2: now is the moment. We're taking advice questions on anything
Speaker 2: that pops up. It's wedding season. Are you having wedding drama?
Speaker 2: Write in about that thing that you can't seem to
Speaker 2: agree with your spouse about but you absolutely know you're right.
Speaker 2: Chelsea can tell you who's right and who's wrong. You
Speaker 2: can write in about a big life decision or just
Speaker 2: something small dating drama.
Speaker 1: Right into Dear.
Speaker 2: Chelsea podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1: Talk about Area fifty one. This is the area that
Speaker 1: we are. Historically America has used to research or study
Speaker 1: any sort of alien life or other extraterrestrial life.
Speaker 3: I would word that differently.
Speaker 1: Okay, do you go go ahead and work.
Speaker 3: It's a secret Air Force base?
Speaker 1: Okay? And it doesn't.
Speaker 3: It's it and they do secret stuff, they do secret
Speaker 3: military stuff. They'll test aircraft, they'll and that became a
Speaker 3: convenient place for UFO and alien enthusiasts to say the
Speaker 3: government is hiding aliens there. Now, let's make it. Just
Speaker 3: make sure we understand the difference between a cover up,
Speaker 3: which would be a thing that happened and no one
Speaker 3: wants you to know firstus just something that's top secret.
Speaker 3: If something's top secret, it's not a cover up, it's
Speaker 3: just top you're not going to learn about unless someone
Speaker 3: leaks it. So it's been the supposed place where the
Speaker 3: government's stockpiling aliens, but that's never been. People have declared
Speaker 3: it again, you have to believe them, But no, I
Speaker 3: want the janitor. Get the janitor right with their smart
Speaker 3: everyone's got a smartphone, high resolution video camera. Just take
Speaker 3: pictures of the alien and then stream it out the
Speaker 3: Janit would lose lose a job immediately, but it would
Speaker 3: be the richest most famous janitor there ever was.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, because you wouldn't really need a job after that,
Speaker 1: that's right, And I think once you've been a janitor
Speaker 1: you shouldn't have to work that long anyway.
Speaker 2: Well, and it is kind of a catch twenty two
Speaker 2: now because everyone says, like, why aren't we seeing all
Speaker 2: these UFOs. Everybody's got a camera phone now, But then
Speaker 2: when you do see a video of somebody catching something strange,
Speaker 2: it's like, oh, well that's fake.
Speaker 3: So yeah, we're living tough times now. Because photoshop was
Speaker 3: the first to be able to just toss in a
Speaker 3: little saucer in your picture. But now do you just
Speaker 3: it's a command line in an AI chatbot, you know,
Speaker 3: produce a picture. So it's really hard now to bring
Speaker 3: convincing video of an alien. So that's why you got
Speaker 3: to kind of bring out the alien.
Speaker 1: So you would say that in your opinion or you
Speaker 1: you tell me.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 1: Area fifty one is just an area that has been
Speaker 1: designated to study this kind of extraterrestrial life.
Speaker 3: No, I'm saying it's to study secret Air Force stuff, right,
Speaker 3: but if you want to think they got they put
Speaker 3: aliens there, okay.
Speaker 1: But identified flying Unidentified flying objects UFO.
Speaker 3: The Air Force has studied UFOs like since forever. I mean,
Speaker 3: there's Project Blue Book was one of the earth been several,
Speaker 3: but that one is perhaps the most famous of them.
Speaker 3: And what it did it studied everybody's account of things
Speaker 3: in the sky that we didn't understand. And remember this
Speaker 3: is the Cold War, all right, and so just think
Speaker 3: of governmental motivation for this. If you crowdsource stuff in
Speaker 3: the sky, because you can't look at every square inch
Speaker 3: of the Earth, and you get people to report it
Speaker 3: to you, they're your radar. They'll find stuff that the
Speaker 3: Russians might be working on. So it's what a brilliant
Speaker 3: way to collate what everybody think. Oh, you might say, oh,
Speaker 3: they could be aliens. That boosts the interests that people
Speaker 3: would place in participating in such a thing and in
Speaker 3: reporting what they find. But in the final report they
Speaker 3: said they found nothing that couldn't otherwise be explained by
Speaker 3: natural causes, and that which couldn't be explained there was
Speaker 3: no strong evidence that it was extraterrestrial, and so but
Speaker 3: there have been other studies. But meanwhile, but kind of
Speaker 3: none of that matter is now because we have high
Speaker 3: ranking people testifying in front of Congress, whistleblowers, insiders, former military,
Speaker 3: former intelligence officers telling you standing there flat footed with
Speaker 3: an on his face after swearing in that they got
Speaker 3: alien bodies, alien crash saucers that they reverse engineered. And so, so, okay,
Speaker 3: it's not just the farmer you know in the back ford.
Speaker 1: You know, Obama admitted it on a podcast recently, and
Speaker 1: that was big.
Speaker 3: Well, well, he's scientifically literate, so he said the correct thing.
Speaker 3: He said, he has no reason to doubt that there
Speaker 3: aren't aliens in the universe, And everyone said, he's thinking
Speaker 3: aliens on Earth or in the you know, but think
Speaker 3: about it, if there was a government cover up, surely
Speaker 3: the president would be in on it. So so, deciding
Speaker 3: whether a president is saying the true speaking the truth
Speaker 3: often is only a matter of whether you agree with
Speaker 3: what the president is saying, and then you say it's
Speaker 3: the truth, right, and so so for me, I just
Speaker 3: just bring out the bring out the octopus, right, bring
Speaker 3: out the elephant. Bring out an elephant. Describing an elephant
Speaker 3: would be just as weird as describing an octopus.
Speaker 1: Think about it, well, when you frame it like that,
Speaker 1: I mean you frame a lot of things in this book,
Speaker 1: which makes it so interesting. Like, say, we all have
Speaker 1: this idea because of all of the movies we've seen
Speaker 1: that have aliens in them, and the way that aliens.
Speaker 3: Have saying we're ready, we're ready for aliens. Yea, all
Speaker 3: the movies. We are so pumped. Bring out the you know,
Speaker 3: show me the aliens sitting in the corner smoking a
Speaker 3: cigarette or so.
Speaker 1: They are so pumped, But we're not ready because we
Speaker 1: don't have a I don't think based on everything you
Speaker 1: say in this book, I don't think we have a
Speaker 1: clear representation of what an alien would even look like.
Speaker 3: That's correct, that's that's correct.
Speaker 1: Or if Donald Trump could be an alien, he could
Speaker 1: be it could be dressed as a human.
Speaker 3: Okay, so I comment on that in there, not Trump specifically,
Speaker 3: but if an alien were masquerading as a human, as
Speaker 3: they did in the movie Men in Black, you could
Speaker 3: do that, but you would not survive a medical exam. Okay,
Speaker 3: your heart is in the wrong place, or you're well.
Speaker 1: What if they're able to mimic being a human being?
Speaker 3: If you mimic it, then what does it matter at
Speaker 3: that point? If it looks like a duck, acts like
Speaker 3: a duck, walks, and just call it a duck. If
Speaker 3: he looks human and you put all the organs in
Speaker 3: the right place and it's got bad breath in the morning,
Speaker 3: it's a human, right. I mean if something else happens weird,
Speaker 3: like it's ton comes out and it's this long, you
Speaker 3: have some evidence.
Speaker 1: What if it was operating on behalf of the whole
Speaker 1: other culture, you know, like say say like, okay, so
Speaker 1: say that's what's happening, right, they come down.
Speaker 3: I even didn't like about which part. No, No, it's fine, Okay,
Speaker 3: I didn't have one part. She finally meets she goes
Speaker 3: back to her alien friends and whatever is their spaceship,
Speaker 3: and so they're there and they're surrounding an illustration of
Speaker 3: the flat Earth. It's like, no, I'm I'm going to
Speaker 3: give you an alien, but I'm not going to give
Speaker 3: you the flat Earth. Okay, we have.
Speaker 1: Nast interesting Why do you think they did that?
Speaker 3: Because they I think they wanted to bring together multiple
Speaker 3: conspiracy series into one narrative. Yeah. I don't know if
Speaker 3: you noticed that at the end, I did it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they're around a circle. Yeah, yeah, No, I caught that
Speaker 3: immediately because the flat Earth, as say, there's Earth and
Speaker 3: then Antarctica is the edge of Earth and it's around
Speaker 3: so you can see that in there. So I think
Speaker 3: they just they had to catch bin and they put
Speaker 3: everything in it. But that's a spoiler alert.
Speaker 1: Well I'll put it in a spoiler alert in audio.
Speaker 3: So I.
Speaker 1: Don't have time to accommodate these people problem. Yea, But
Speaker 1: I like the way you posited in the beginning of
Speaker 1: the book where you're like, if aliens were to come
Speaker 1: to Earth and say, okay, take me to your leader,
Speaker 1: we might confuse. We might think that leader is Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: We might think that leader is Taylor Swift. We might
Speaker 1: think that leader is you.
Speaker 3: Oh no, no, no, we know our leader is our official leaders,
Speaker 3: the Pope. But the alien might not because they're seeing
Speaker 3: our leaked radio signals and they're seeing who we worship,
Speaker 3: and there's Tailor Swift, there's Beyonce, there's people filling the
Speaker 3: airwaves mm hmmm, and they're thinking those are the important
Speaker 3: people who these so they might expect to be taken
Speaker 3: to Tailor Swift, is my only point.
Speaker 1: So what do you believe?
Speaker 3: Because the radio waves are escaping at the speed of light.
Speaker 3: So we're in the middle of a radio bubble, which
Speaker 3: is the the broadcast signals of our culture expanding at
Speaker 3: the speed of light. And it's gone out. It's about
Speaker 3: eighty light years.
Speaker 1: Across, and each light year is one thousand years, or
Speaker 1: each light year is one year light years six trillion miles,
Speaker 1: six trillion miles miles.
Speaker 3: That's how far the light is gone. So if you've
Speaker 3: only ever been on cable, you're not in those airwaves.
Speaker 3: If you did anything on TV, they'll get a little
Speaker 3: piece of Chelsea coming by their way.
Speaker 2: M Chelsea lately is not not going out right.
Speaker 1: It was on cable was that think, Yes, I was
Speaker 1: on cable. That sounds like a dig Neil.
Speaker 3: No, I'm just so you know. You know what else
Speaker 3: is not out there is Beavis and Buttead that I
Speaker 3: think we should be perhaps thankful for that. If the
Speaker 3: aliens first encounter with humans are these shows, it would
Speaker 3: be just a little weird.
Speaker 1: After studying this stuff for as long as you have been,
Speaker 1: what do you think really with regard to aliens?
Speaker 3: So you look at life got started pretty quickly on Earth,
Speaker 3: like almost as soon as it could happen.
Speaker 1: How old is it planet Earth? Thirteen?
Speaker 3: That's the universe thirteen eight billion years. Earth came much later,
Speaker 3: four and a half billion years.
Speaker 1: Four and a half billions, and we spent half.
Speaker 3: A billion years very hot because we're getting slammed because
Speaker 3: the Solar system is forming, and so you don't want
Speaker 3: to start the clock.
Speaker 1: Yet, so nobody's alive.
Speaker 3: No, no, you can't, there's no you can't even have
Speaker 3: big molecules. Then start the clock when we're cool enough
Speaker 3: to have big molecules. Life got underway within one hundred
Speaker 3: to two hundred million years. Sounds like a long time,
Speaker 3: but it's five percent of the timeline of the Earth,
Speaker 3: So it's almost as soon as it could. So a B.
Speaker 3: We are made of the most common ingredients in the universe, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, peroxide. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so so peroxide is I think proxide. It's oh, what
Speaker 3: is peroxide?
Speaker 1: You're not asking?
Speaker 3: So we got underway quickly, and we're made of the
Speaker 3: most common ingredients in the universe.
Speaker 1: But did we get underway quickly? I thought you just.
Speaker 3: Said life life humans Humans are much later.
Speaker 1: Okay, so organism correct.
Speaker 3: So if that's the case, you would be inexclusibly egocentric
Speaker 3: to suggest that we are alone in the universe, because
Speaker 3: the universe is vast. There's hundreds of billions of stars
Speaker 3: in the galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy, and hundreds of
Speaker 3: billions of galaxies in the observable universe. So run around
Speaker 3: here saying you're the only thing happened. If we were
Speaker 3: made of some rare ingredient, you could say we're special,
Speaker 3: something special happened here, but we're not, and so you can't.
Speaker 3: And so yeah, no one is going to deny that
Speaker 3: this life. That's a separate question from whether we have
Speaker 3: been visited. And what I do in the book is
Speaker 3: I just ask other sets of questions that other people aren't.
Speaker 3: I say, all right, if we've been visited by aliens,
Speaker 3: why are they only showing up in restricted military airspace?
Speaker 3: Why are they only coming into the grips of our government?
Speaker 3: The government is not everywhere we have the whole surface
Speaker 3: of the Earth. Why why isn't there a crash flying
Speaker 3: saucer in some place where there isn't a government that's
Speaker 3: going to cover it up. They're just questions I'm asking. I.
Speaker 1: Okay, I've asked these questions too, because I thought Area
Speaker 1: fifty one was just stupidly Unless this is also what
Speaker 1: you're saying, I assumed, Wait, why is extraterrestrial life only
Speaker 1: go to this one area?
Speaker 3: That's not what you would have to You would have
Speaker 3: to the alien would have to land, and they have
Speaker 3: to secretly grab it and take it to the with
Speaker 3: no one seeing this. They'd have to take it to
Speaker 3: the Now they solve that in Men in Black because
Speaker 3: they had that little light that you look at and
Speaker 3: then it takes away your memory of what just happened,
Speaker 3: so that they needed that absolution.
Speaker 1: Sure, but or is it this or versus alien life
Speaker 1: and extraterrestrial life happens and is rampant, and then they
Speaker 1: just put everything in the area fifty one to study
Speaker 1: it in that little.
Speaker 3: Sense, you have to somehow get it there, no matter
Speaker 3: where it landed.
Speaker 1: Right. So, but what's the problem with that?
Speaker 3: To get there with no one noticing it and the
Speaker 3: number of people who would be in on it. There's
Speaker 3: a quote from the quote from Benjamin Franklin in his Almanac,
Speaker 3: Three people can keep a secret if two of them
Speaker 3: are dead. He wrote that seventeen eighty five. The boy
Speaker 3: knew something about people's inability, especially juicy. You could keep
Speaker 3: a secret. If it's not juicy, then no one cares,
Speaker 3: and you don't have these urges to say you want
Speaker 3: to hear a secret. So that's why I'm I don't
Speaker 3: have a problem imagining we're stockpiling aliens, but since we've
Speaker 3: had insiders saying that they're there, and so it's no
Speaker 3: longer a cover up. You can't say you're covering something up.
Speaker 3: If insiders are telling you you're covering it up, it's
Speaker 3: no longer a cover up. So there, so is it
Speaker 3: too much to ask to bring out the alien? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Bring it out, because I don't feel like I don't
Speaker 1: think anyone. Well, actually, I don't know what people think.
Speaker 1: I mean, people are about to vote for Spencer Pratt
Speaker 1: for a mayor of la So I don't know what
Speaker 1: people are thinking. But as a general idea in the world,
Speaker 1: I think, like you know, extraterrestrial life and aliens, it's
Speaker 1: more like an of an understanding now, like, of course
Speaker 1: something else must exist. Of course we're not the only people.
Speaker 3: That's why those who said the reason why the government
Speaker 3: doesn't want to show because they're afraid the public would
Speaker 3: freak out. Look at all the movies we've been treated
Speaker 3: to out of the creativity of our own species. Just
Speaker 3: look at, like I said, what the insiders are saying.
Speaker 3: I think it might even be anticlimactic the alien. Come,
Speaker 3: I say, Hey, we got better aliens in the movie
Speaker 3: Spielberg than that, you know. So yeah, I'm just sitting
Speaker 3: back eating popcorn waiting for the presentation of the alien.
Speaker 1: And what are your first hand experiences like that you've
Speaker 1: heard of from other people in your community that have
Speaker 1: like that have stayed with you?
Speaker 3: Okay, so none of my colleagues have ever seen anything
Speaker 3: they could not explain. I spent my whole life looking
Speaker 3: up I was a geek kid from age nine. I
Speaker 3: had a telescope at age eleven, at age twelve, and.
Speaker 1: So you didn't upsex for a long time. It's okay,
Speaker 1: you're able to give back another way.
Speaker 3: Always marry an astrophysicist, because you know where they are
Speaker 3: at night like that. And we used to have these
Speaker 3: geeky things, the bumper stickers. Nobody uses bumper stickers anymore.
Speaker 1: Big for yourself.
Speaker 3: I love heavenly bodies. You know this sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Black holes are out of sight. There's the geek bumper stickers.
Speaker 3: So I care about observing the night sky. So I
Speaker 3: know about the sun, moon, stars and planets, and I
Speaker 3: you know what else. I know about weather because it
Speaker 3: gets in the way of me looking at the night sky.
Speaker 3: So I know all kinds of weather patterns, cloud patterns,
Speaker 3: what twilight light can do, how it can deceive you.
Speaker 3: So I would say a few percent of the things
Speaker 3: that I've seen that were really weird, I only knew
Speaker 3: what they were because of my extensive background in the subject.
Speaker 3: Telling me that other people would just report that right
Speaker 3: for the police. Whatever. So back to lower than average
Speaker 3: reporting of UFOs among people who spend their whole lives
Speaker 3: looking up in.
Speaker 1: The astronomy computing, does you understand what you're looking at?
Speaker 1: Like I just I recently went to Finland and saw
Speaker 1: the Northern lights beautiful and so once that was broken.
Speaker 3: Your first time, Yes, imagine if you didn't know what
Speaker 3: it was, I.
Speaker 1: Would think that was alien.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, completely, and in fact, the very name Aurora
Speaker 3: I think through through that's the official name of the
Speaker 3: northern lights, Aurora borealis. And in the south it's Aurora Australis.
Speaker 3: If you didn't know that, just with I think it was.
Speaker 3: Is it in Greek mythology there's an aurora a colorful Yeah.
Speaker 3: So it's beautiful and it's it's fully explained. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Another one, there are clouds, so I have to be
Speaker 3: Professor Neil for a moment. Okay. You have warm, moist
Speaker 3: air going horizontally across the ground, and it hits a mountain,
Speaker 3: and then the air goes up the mountain. It's cooler
Speaker 3: on mountains than it is at the bottom. If you
Speaker 3: have moist air, that moist moisture condenses out of the
Speaker 3: air and makes clouds. That's why it's common to see
Speaker 3: no clouds anywhere in a mountain a clouds right on
Speaker 3: top of the mountain. Those are called aura graphic clouds,
Speaker 3: and depending on how they're made, they can look like
Speaker 3: a a disk, like a cap on top.
Speaker 1: Of the mountain, because they do not because they get stuck.
Speaker 3: Well, because that's because it's cold enough there to take
Speaker 3: the moisture. That because right near this humidity in the
Speaker 3: air here. But it's not a cloud. If you take
Speaker 3: it high up, it'll condense and make a cloud right way,
Speaker 3: hang on, right at the top of the mountain. Now,
Speaker 3: now the sun sets for you, so you're in darkness,
Speaker 3: but the top of the mountain still sees the sun,
Speaker 3: the setting sunlight, and so the cloud takes on this
Speaker 3: this this reddish orange hue, and you're in darkness and
Speaker 3: there's this glowing cloud at the top. That's the mothership,
Speaker 3: of course, but that my book. I have a photos
Speaker 3: of this just so you can see if.
Speaker 1: If but if also yeah, but why is the cold
Speaker 1: air get stuck there? When heat rises?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So what happens is that sun doesn't heat the air.
Speaker 3: This sun heats the ground, and the ground heats the air,
Speaker 3: and that air will rise and so rising air if
Speaker 3: it has any moisture at all eventually condenses out and
Speaker 3: makes clouds. That's why clouds are generally well above your
Speaker 3: head and not down here. A cloud can form at
Speaker 3: ground level. We have a different word for that, isn't
Speaker 3: that great? A fog? That's just a cloud that's like
Speaker 3: it on the ground. And when you're in a fog,
Speaker 3: you're never hot. Fogs are always kind of dank and
Speaker 3: a little cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right right, Yeah, like the word dank. Actually, we
Speaker 1: need to be using that more.
Speaker 3: Dank. It's a great word.
Speaker 1: But if heat always rises, why are the mountaintops so cold?
Speaker 3: Oh? Because, yeah, there's less ground around you to be heated.
Speaker 3: It's the ground that heats the air. You've been in
Speaker 3: an airplane, have you've seen the temperature? You know that?
Speaker 3: Where are you in the rude and what's the outside temperature?
Speaker 3: It's forty below zero outside. This is the same earth
Speaker 3: where you were just down year and it's seventy five degrees.
Speaker 3: Why you go up a little, You're closer to the
Speaker 3: sun as you get forty degrees below zero. So the
Speaker 3: sun is not heating the air. The sun is heating
Speaker 3: the ground. So the hottest part of herst atmosphere is
Speaker 3: just above the ground.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is good.
Speaker 3: Take these clouds. Okay, sorry, it's just in black and white.
Speaker 3: But those are oorographic clouds. Now, imagine that twilight lit
Speaker 3: from below. Because you're lower down, your sun is set
Speaker 3: for you, it sets later for people higher up. Now
Speaker 3: on the previous page, So that cloud was made by
Speaker 3: a rocket in twilight because its rocket plume is high
Speaker 3: enough it still sees the sun. Evidence that Earth is
Speaker 3: curved is you're high up. You see.
Speaker 1: I didn't pushka. I think that was shepherd or something.
Speaker 3: I was just being articulate with my fingers in my hand.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 3: So so that's still in sunlight and you're not, so
Speaker 3: it's just glowing against darkened sky. People freak out when
Speaker 3: they see that that's a SpaceX launch.
Speaker 1: By the way, Oh okay, I mean it makes a
Speaker 1: lot of sense. What you're saying is because you have
Speaker 1: an eye, a keen eye that has studied this. So
Speaker 1: when you're looking at these things that another a lay
Speaker 1: person may look at and say, oh, well, what is that.
Speaker 1: That's got to be an identified flying object or what
Speaker 1: I identifiable blah blah blah.
Speaker 3: You know, because yeah, more than most people, when I
Speaker 3: look up right, But that doesn't mean that some of
Speaker 3: them may have no explanation at all. I'm not denying that,
Speaker 3: but even UFO enthusiasts recognize that most people, when they're
Speaker 3: identifying most things, will have a natural explanation. They want
Speaker 3: to sift through all of that and get to just
Speaker 3: the bottom the few percent that might have no obvious explanation,
Speaker 3: that's all. And if those are aliens, I would then
Speaker 3: ask other questions.
Speaker 1: And but do you have like, have you.
Speaker 3: Heard either from any of my colleagues.
Speaker 1: Nothing, You've never heard anything that you were like, Oh
Speaker 1: my god, this is mine, this is blowing my mind.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Do I have a cousin who, while in Puerto Rico,
Speaker 3: said that there was a spaceship that was hovering over
Speaker 3: the nearby homes and it stayed there for a while
Speaker 3: and then it shot off into the distance. And I
Speaker 3: don't know him to hallucinate. He did like drugs at
Speaker 3: the time, but not so. Yeah, so do many people,
Speaker 3: but they're not talking that way, right and so and
Speaker 3: he said someone else saw it with him, So okay, okay,
Speaker 3: that was the early nineteen seventies. You realize the only
Speaker 3: two kinds of people who carry cameras. Back then, tourists
Speaker 3: and journalists, we didn't have cameras. In fact, most people
Speaker 3: you were in show business. Most other people are photographed
Speaker 3: once a year for the school picture. Okay, that's it.
Speaker 3: So access to cameras. So all I'm saying is, if
Speaker 3: that happens again, take out your smartphone video it. I
Speaker 3: have a colleague who's head of a committee who said
Speaker 3: he appointed by Congress. By the way, he wants to
Speaker 3: set up a do I call it a task force,
Speaker 3: an app that everybody has on their phones. If you
Speaker 3: see something, you go inside the app, and when you
Speaker 3: take pictures in the app, all the metadata is preserved,
Speaker 3: what direction you were looking, the elevation, the altitude, the
Speaker 3: color balance, all of this, so that multiple people do it,
Speaker 3: you can triangulate on the thing that you saw and
Speaker 3: establish its authenticity at not being something in your head.
Speaker 3: Even without that, everybody's got a high resolution phone. We
Speaker 3: don't have pictures of people getting abducted. Why not everybody?
Speaker 3: It was all the rage in the seventies. Everybody's getting
Speaker 3: abducted through stories written about in the papers in a
Speaker 3: national inquirer. That's half their sales. We're talking about abducted
Speaker 3: people getting abducted by aliens. So show me the alien
Speaker 3: walking towards you, abducting you and live stream it. That
Speaker 3: will go viral. Videos go viral for less, right.
Speaker 1: So I feel like though, if there is are, if
Speaker 1: there are aliens, and they are so much more intelligent
Speaker 1: than we are, since they're the ones studying us, not
Speaker 1: the other way around, then they would be able to
Speaker 1: make sure that that footage never was released.
Speaker 3: That's what they said. In the days when they had cameras,
Speaker 3: they said, oh, it did take pictures, but they blanked
Speaker 3: out the job right, right, if you're live streaming, okay,
Speaker 3: you see it, and did you start live streaming? That's
Speaker 3: and the app would probably make that easier, by the way.
Speaker 3: So here's another thing. There used to be these flying
Speaker 3: saucers along the roadside that people had pictures of it. Again,
Speaker 3: why would you have a picture of it because no
Speaker 3: one had cameras. But let's say you did happen to
Speaker 3: have a camera, and so there's a flying saucer there,
Speaker 3: it was clear as day there it is usually dark
Speaker 3: against the light sky. And all those went away when
Speaker 3: cars stopped using hubcaps. There are no roadside flying saucers
Speaker 3: pictures of roadside hubcaps. These were set things from your
Speaker 3: wheel that you'd hammered on and they were kind of
Speaker 3: decorative sometimes, And every road is guaranteed to have a pothole.
Speaker 3: You hit the poddle, you lose a hubcap, you don't
Speaker 3: even know it, and you're the hub cops were strewn
Speaker 3: along the freeways and so if you find one in
Speaker 3: Fla it take a picture. You've got a UFO. We
Speaker 3: don't have those anymore since cars won't have to.
Speaker 1: Then what is yours? What do you think?
Speaker 3: I think picture people took pictures of hubcaps.
Speaker 1: But what do you think now? So do you think
Speaker 1: there is not an intelligent life like and other places
Speaker 1: or in other places, but we just haven't witnessed it? Like,
Speaker 1: what do you what's your assessment of bring.
Speaker 3: Out the aliens. They're people who say they've witnessed it,
Speaker 3: and so we've taken away the surprise factor because of that,
Speaker 3: and people of high rank. There's a two nearly two
Speaker 3: hour documentary on this, the Day of Disclosure, that just
Speaker 3: came out, like last year, in the end of last year,
Speaker 3: a whole parade of people, including government officials. So I'm
Speaker 3: tired of hearing people ask do you believe in aliens?
Speaker 3: Bring out the aliens, and then no one has to
Speaker 3: ask that question again. You don't have to believe in octopuses,
Speaker 3: you don't have to believe in elephants.
Speaker 1: Do you believe we have aliens that were holding or
Speaker 1: hiding in this country.
Speaker 3: I don't like to believe in things that I have
Speaker 3: to believe in to believe.
Speaker 1: Okay, yes, yes, it actually did.
Speaker 3: It did.
Speaker 1: It's gonna have a lasting impact, that's okay, Okay, a
Speaker 1: reverberation if you will, Chelsea. I feel like you need
Speaker 1: to home with Neil. No. I don't mean in a
Speaker 1: romantic sense. I meant for like a learning song.
Speaker 2: But I feel like you need to dive into quantum theory.
Speaker 1: We've got weather.
Speaker 3: I cherish adults who are curious.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about quantum physics. Break it down, bring it off,
Speaker 1: break down what that means.
Speaker 3: Okay, So you want a little primer on yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Want, yeah to make it digestible for our audience and
Speaker 1: our listeners. Sure, this has been an ongoing kind of
Speaker 1: curiosity of mine because I can't really seem to wrap
Speaker 1: my head around it. So I was looking forward to.
Speaker 3: So let's start out with the I forgot who said
Speaker 3: this famous physicist might have been Moxiplank, who said, the
Speaker 3: day you understand quantum physics is the day you can
Speaker 3: be sure that you don't because it everything about it
Speaker 3: is weird. You know, how do what to you? What
Speaker 3: makes sense? What makes sense to you? We were forged
Speaker 3: in the planes of the Serengetti trying to not get
Speaker 3: eaten by lions. So that's how we evolved. So we
Speaker 3: have a certain sense about that something with big teeth
Speaker 3: is chasing you, you run the opposite direction. You pretty
Speaker 3: much don't have to think about that, all right. That's
Speaker 3: what forged our senses. When the microscope and the particle
Speaker 3: accelerator got us to very small form manifestations of nature,
Speaker 3: whole other laws of physics revealed themselves that we didn't
Speaker 3: evolve under. Yes, it matters in us, in our molecules,
Speaker 3: but in our sense, our sensory system does not experience it,
Speaker 3: and so it's not part of what we call common sense.
Speaker 3: I just want to start with that.
Speaker 1: Okay, common sense, it's.
Speaker 3: Not common sense. It's common sense that i'd let something
Speaker 3: go in it drops gravity, you push something in common
Speaker 3: sense is.
Speaker 1: An understanding that we all share.
Speaker 3: Yes, because while growing up in the same world. All right,
Speaker 3: so here's what we find. You're sitting there. If I
Speaker 3: shine light on you to take a picture, you're still
Speaker 3: sitting there. Okay, that's because you are much bigger than
Speaker 3: the photons of light that are striking you. Okay, so
Speaker 3: they hit you, they reflect off, they go to my camera.
Speaker 3: There's Chelsea and Chelsea and Chelsea and Chelsea seven times
Speaker 3: on your wall. Okay, what happens if I make you
Speaker 3: smaller half the size, one hundredth this size, a billionth
Speaker 3: this size. Here's what happens the moment you're the size
Speaker 3: of particles, and I say, is the particle sitting there
Speaker 3: on the couch? Let me find out, and I shine
Speaker 3: light on it. The photon hits the particle, the particle
Speaker 3: pops to another state of existence. You don't have access
Speaker 3: to matter on that scale, because to even know what
Speaker 3: it's doing requires shining light on it, popping it into
Speaker 3: some other place, some other state of its own existence.
Speaker 3: And so so what it means is when we describe
Speaker 3: matter at its smaller scales, we describe it statistically. The
Speaker 3: particles somewhere there and you want to find out exactly
Speaker 3: where it is. You can shine light on it, but
Speaker 3: it's going to be somewhere else. Just keep doing this.
Speaker 3: You can create a statistical understanding of nature at that scale.
Speaker 3: And Einstein hated that. He said on multiple occasions, God
Speaker 3: does not play dice with the universe statistic and so
Speaker 3: so it turns out Einstein is wrong. What the universe
Speaker 3: doesn't plays poker. Okay, it'll play dice. The universe doesn't
Speaker 3: play poker. So that's one feature of very tiny particles.
Speaker 3: We are so big. It doesn't do that to us.
Speaker 3: It just doesn't. Okay. Another thing that particle can behave
Speaker 3: as a particle and as a wave. That's kind of weird.
Speaker 3: We have no way to wrap our brain around that.
Speaker 3: We tried. We tried inventing a new word. Wavicle. Never
Speaker 3: caught on you ever hear that way now? Never caught on.
Speaker 3: I thought it, we had a chance. I thought it
Speaker 3: back in the seventies, maybe sixty. I thought I had
Speaker 3: a chance. Never caught up wavicle. Because you now have
Speaker 3: to put in your head the existence of something in
Speaker 3: two completely different manifestations of itself simultaneously. That's not how
Speaker 3: everyday life works. You're not You're not sitting there as
Speaker 3: a human being one moment and a and a you know,
Speaker 3: and a candle in the next moment, not knowing which
Speaker 3: you are at any No, you are. You are persistently
Speaker 3: this but a wave particle. Duality is fundamental to quantum physics.
Speaker 1: Meaning that the two things can be happening with your
Speaker 1: person at the same time or with any matter.
Speaker 3: The particle doesn't matter matter. I feel bad my foot
Speaker 3: came off the couch.
Speaker 1: Well do you feel bad for your foot or a particle?
Speaker 3: So uh, other things it does. You can create two
Speaker 3: particles at the same time because matter and energy are interchangeable,
Speaker 3: so you can take energy.
Speaker 1: That equals matter and energy are energy equals.
Speaker 3: Mc squared Since nineteen oh five understood that and so
Speaker 3: one Just so, that's another duality thing. It's just the
Speaker 3: same thing, different sides of the same coin, matter and energy.
Speaker 3: So a particle. You can take energy and create a
Speaker 3: pair of particles that are complimentary to each other, a
Speaker 3: matter antimatter pair. The other ways, you can create particles
Speaker 3: in this way and then separate them. They know about
Speaker 3: each other. They I don't want to call them the
Speaker 3: same particle. I'm going to say they're entangled with.
Speaker 1: Each other because of proximity.
Speaker 3: Because of how we made them, how we create. Now
Speaker 3: we can put one here and the other one across
Speaker 3: the room. If I make a measurement on this particle,
Speaker 3: I will immediately know the properties of the other particle
Speaker 3: with which it was entangled, because that has complementary properties.
Speaker 3: And so was there a limit to this distance. No.
Speaker 3: They can be quantum entangled across the universe, and when
Speaker 3: you measure one, the other one gets known instantly. So
Speaker 3: this is something moving faster than the speed of light
Speaker 3: in the vacuum of space. They're what we call virtual particles,
Speaker 3: pairs that come in and out of existence, and they're entangled.
Speaker 3: I spoke with a colleague of mine who studies this.
Speaker 3: He said, there's emergent thought that the entangled particles are
Speaker 3: connected via wormholes, and that those wormholes is this are
Speaker 3: the stitching in the fabric of space time. So it's
Speaker 3: like WHOA, Okay, So again this is quantum physics just
Speaker 3: being out there. By the way, there is no creation, storage,
Speaker 3: and retrieval of digital information without the co them. The
Speaker 3: entire it revolution exists because we figured out how quantum
Speaker 3: physics worked one hundred years ago. In the nineteen twenties
Speaker 3: watershed decade in science.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, in nineteen twenties.
Speaker 3: Nineteen twenty Oh my god. If you have to pick
Speaker 3: a decade in the history of our species, that's the
Speaker 3: decade because in that decade we discovered that the whole
Speaker 3: universe is not just the stars of the night sky.
Speaker 3: Their whole other galaxies that have stars of their own.
Speaker 1: But aren't we still discovered. I mean, I don't want
Speaker 1: to the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 3: It's not a matter of the number of these things.
Speaker 3: It's the nature of the truth. Okay, Okay. The nature
Speaker 3: of the truth is the stars of the night sky
Speaker 3: are not the entirety of our universe. There are other
Speaker 3: groupings of stars out there that are galaxies just like ours,
Speaker 3: but they're far away that just like looks like fuzz
Speaker 3: and they're billions of those hundreds.
Speaker 1: Of billions, and we don't we haven't even discovered all that.
Speaker 3: Well, we've seen them, but we don't go there because
Speaker 3: we get Okay, So there's that. That was nineteen twenty three,
Speaker 3: in the mid twenties, then nineteen twenty nine, Edwin Hubble
Speaker 3: the man discovers that these galaxies are flying apart from
Speaker 3: each other. So we're in an expanding universe. And in
Speaker 3: the nineteen twenties we discover what particles do when PopEd
Speaker 3: and prodded, and we came to finally understand the atom.
Speaker 3: That is quantum physics, and all of our electronics depends
Speaker 3: on it. It exploits it, it understands it, it uses it.
Speaker 1: And so what is the particle to the atom?
Speaker 3: Oh? Right, So you have an electron in a traditional atom,
Speaker 3: and then you have the nucleus, which will have protons
Speaker 3: and neutrons. Typically, okay, nucleus protons have a positive charge,
Speaker 3: electrons negative, So you'd think they would ah, you would
Speaker 3: think the electron would just collapse into the nucleus because
Speaker 3: it's got to opposite charges attract, right, But no, it
Speaker 3: stays out here. And and we so desperately wanted the
Speaker 3: atom to look like the Solar system. It was wait
Speaker 3: a minute, is a nucleus and their electrons going around it?
Speaker 3: Maybe it's it's the Solar system all over again, but
Speaker 3: just on a small scale. And so you look close,
Speaker 3: it's like, no, the electron is not orbiting. It's like
Speaker 3: hanging out in these clouds described by the wave that
Speaker 3: it also is. Okay, so but so badly did we
Speaker 3: want to analogize itto the solar system that we called
Speaker 3: it not an orbit but an orbital. So electrons are
Speaker 3: in orbitals around the nucleus of the atom. So now
Speaker 3: you have an atom. Electrons can come and go. So
Speaker 3: the but the atom is the nucleus and the electrons.
Speaker 3: Then the electrons can share their orbitals with other atoms.
Speaker 3: They can give one donate share. Then you make a molecule.
Speaker 3: So molecule is more than one atom joined. And here's
Speaker 3: what's completely mind fuck. Okay. Hydrogen is a flammable gas.
Speaker 3: Oxygen promotes fire. Okay, no smoking near oxygen tanks. You
Speaker 3: put them together. It makes H two O, which is water,
Speaker 3: which extinguishes fires.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Take sodium, a metal that's soft enough to cut with
Speaker 3: a knife. That's explosive if you put it in water,
Speaker 3: like labs are always immersed in oil, it would explode
Speaker 3: if you put it in water. Chlorine a deadly poisonous
Speaker 3: gas used in chemical warfare in the First World War.
Speaker 3: Chlorine gas. Okay, you take sodium, combine it with chlorine.
Speaker 3: You get table salt sodium chloride. So the behavior of
Speaker 3: molecules is so different from the individual behavior of the
Speaker 3: atoms themselves. It's like a it's like a circus. Yeah, of,
Speaker 3: And this is why chemistry is an entire field onto itself,
Speaker 3: and all that is enabled, empowered, and manifested because the
Speaker 3: rules of quantum physics.
Speaker 1: So when we talk about something like I think what
Speaker 1: we've been talking about more on this show has been
Speaker 1: like simulations, right with regard when we talk about I
Speaker 1: think we kind of mistake, we think we're talking about
Speaker 1: quantum physics, but we're actually not. Because well, book, when
Speaker 1: people talk about time travel or space travel, like what
Speaker 1: what what purview does that fall under?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean you can travel forward in time using
Speaker 3: Einstein's relativity.
Speaker 1: And do you believe in that?
Speaker 3: Oh? No, no, no, we can.
Speaker 1: We've that's real.
Speaker 2: It's we're doing right now.
Speaker 3: It's well, we're traveling forward in time one second per second, yes,
Speaker 3: but we are prisoners of the present forever, transitioning between
Speaker 3: our inaccessible past and our unknowable future. And so the
Speaker 3: holy grail in there would be to step out of
Speaker 3: that prison cell and access your timeline either forward or backwards.
Speaker 3: I talk about that in a book as a possible
Speaker 3: alien power where their relationship with time is different from ours.
Speaker 3: And if they're living like a fourth or higher dimension,
Speaker 3: then you know how you can move around in this
Speaker 3: room up, down, left, right, and you can repeat that
Speaker 3: all right. You're not a prisoner in any given spot.
Speaker 3: Imagine your timeline stepping out of it and then rejoining it.
Speaker 3: And then someone says, well, when were you born? No,
Speaker 3: I'm always being born, right. Then when did you die?
Speaker 3: I'm always dying right here, and I'm always doing all
Speaker 3: these things at all times. So it changes how you
Speaker 3: think about time. Now. With einstized relativity, if you go fast,
Speaker 3: time will tick more slowly for you than people back
Speaker 3: here on Earth, so that when you come back you
Speaker 3: might have aged. Depending on how fast you go, you
Speaker 3: could age a year and Earth would have aged ten years.
Speaker 3: That was famously shown in the movie Interstellar. Did you
Speaker 3: see that film?
Speaker 1: I did, but I don't really remember that.
Speaker 3: It's a lot of really crazy sciencey stuff.
Speaker 1: Which his theory of relativity means that you can travel
Speaker 1: to the future, yes, but you can't go backwards.
Speaker 3: No, you can't go backwards right. You can travel into
Speaker 3: the future of the people who used to you were
Speaker 3: hanging out with. Okay, and because because when you're traveling fast,
Speaker 3: time ticks more slowly for you.
Speaker 1: But traveling fast at the speed of light fast.
Speaker 3: Speed of light, time stops. So you don't want to
Speaker 3: go that fast you want to go you don't even
Speaker 3: just half half of that be greedy.
Speaker 1: But how are you traveling like that a space? You
Speaker 1: have to be in a spaceship.
Speaker 3: Or a rocket, I presume, otherwise space is not very
Speaker 3: very good for you.
Speaker 1: But I mean, people in space aren't time traveling.
Speaker 3: They are if they traveled so astronauts moving five miles
Speaker 3: per second. That's how fast they are in the special Okay,
Speaker 3: small compared to the speed of light. But you can
Speaker 3: calculate when they come back how much younger they are
Speaker 3: compared with a twin that they might have left on Earth.
Speaker 3: And so you can say, well, is it just a theory?
Speaker 3: How do we know?
Speaker 1: Wait, they're younger than their counterpart because.
Speaker 3: They didn't age as fast, so therefore they're younger. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they're not younger than when they left. They're just not
Speaker 3: as old as they would have been had they stayed
Speaker 3: on Earth. Yeah, I know, I know.
Speaker 1: But if you can go forward, then you should be
Speaker 1: able to go backwards.
Speaker 3: Well except Scott.
Speaker 1: Bacula did promise us this, and quantumly, I mean.
Speaker 3: The issue is going back in time. Because so suppose
Speaker 3: you go back in time and prevent your parents from
Speaker 3: meeting each other.
Speaker 1: That would be a great by the way, or as
Speaker 1: was shown in at least one film, and I forgot
Speaker 1: which one it was, might have even been a rival.
Speaker 3: If you go back in time and delay your parents
Speaker 3: for having sex for ten minutes, probably a different sperm
Speaker 3: would have fertil lazed the egg and you would be
Speaker 3: someone else. You'd be one of your siblings, but not you.
Speaker 1: But I bet I'd still have a podcast.
Speaker 3: So it doesn't require the gore of the terminator to
Speaker 3: kill people to prevent someone from being born. Just prevent
Speaker 3: two people from meeting. Watch. If you did that, then
Speaker 3: you never have been born. To have gone back in
Speaker 3: time to prevent them from meeting each other. Just think
Speaker 3: it through. Think it through. So there is a paradox
Speaker 3: of backwards time travel that is not entirely resolvable unless
Speaker 3: the universe splits into a whole other world. And so
Speaker 3: they're the multi universe people who think this way.
Speaker 2: They did talk a little bit about that in Dark Matter,
Speaker 2: Blake Crouch's novel.
Speaker 1: And then there was a.
Speaker 2: Show that came out last year or last couple of years,
Speaker 2: where you know, he is sort of it's a multiverse thing.
Speaker 2: He's like, well, in this other universe, my wife and
Speaker 2: I conceived our child of a few minutes different, and
Speaker 2: it's like a boy instead of a girl, or it's
Speaker 2: you know, a totally different.
Speaker 3: Came So in that way, whatever timeline you disrupted, it
Speaker 3: became its own timeline and its own future. So, because
Speaker 3: you would have prevented your parents from meeting, and therefore
Speaker 3: you would not have been born, to go back in
Speaker 3: time to prevent your parents from meeting, the only real
Speaker 3: way out of that is to have the universe split
Speaker 3: and you create a whole other timeline of events.
Speaker 1: But why does going back in time necessarily preclude you
Speaker 1: from being born?
Speaker 3: Only if you happened, either on purpose or by accident,
Speaker 3: prevented your parents from me each other.
Speaker 1: But isn't it a scientific theory? And maybe it's not.
Speaker 1: You tell me that for every like, for every thought
Speaker 1: or every action, there's a reaction.
Speaker 3: Well, in forces, yeah, there's a force.
Speaker 1: There's a there's an opposing force, correct, right, So if
Speaker 1: you could go into the future, you could go to
Speaker 1: the past.
Speaker 3: Yeah, except it's not so much that you're stepping out
Speaker 3: of your timeline and then rejoining the future. Your time
Speaker 3: is just going more slowly going forward for everything. I
Speaker 3: understand that, just at a different rate. That's not the
Speaker 3: same thing as stepping out and rejoining. Okay, yeah, because
Speaker 3: to your point, if you could do that, then why
Speaker 3: not go to the past. But if you go back
Speaker 3: to the past, you're going back to a predestined.
Speaker 1: Event, event that has already happened, and.
Speaker 3: You're not going to change it. Okay, Okay, So now
Speaker 3: Stephen Hawking came out with a chronology uh protection conjecture,
Speaker 3: which is he's suggesting that maybe one day in the
Speaker 3: future we will discover a law of physics that says
Speaker 3: why that's impossible to happen. And what is that called
Speaker 3: a chronology protection?
Speaker 1: Correction protection?
Speaker 3: I didn't say erection, that would.
Speaker 1: No, I know, I don't worry. I won't on you.
Speaker 3: So, so this time travel thing is it's no end
Speaker 3: of storytelling and science fiction. People love it. Now here
Speaker 3: here's here's this scenario that I just want you to
Speaker 3: think about. Uh, there's a hypothetical particle called a tachion
Speaker 3: from the Greek root tachios, which is fast like tecometer
Speaker 3: measures how fast your engine is turning. So so we
Speaker 3: invented that word for this hypothetical particle that lives faster
Speaker 3: than the speed of light. Okay, if it did that,
Speaker 3: it would live backwards in time. So let's look at
Speaker 3: what that world would be like. And let's assume one
Speaker 3: day in the future we harness these tachions and I
Speaker 3: can send you a text with tachions. You would then
Speaker 3: get the text before I sent it. That's kind of cool.
Speaker 3: So watch what happens. You're my friend, I care about you.
Speaker 3: You're walking down the walkway and you slip on a
Speaker 3: banana peel and get hurt. And I say, okay, I
Speaker 3: can prevent that from happening. All I have to do
Speaker 3: is text you with tachions. Said you get a text
Speaker 3: before that happened. Okay, So watch what happens. I send
Speaker 3: you the text and I say, Chelsea, watch out for
Speaker 3: the banana peel. While you're reading the text, you step
Speaker 3: on the banana peel because you weren't looking where you
Speaker 3: were going, so the banana peel fate is built into
Speaker 3: that timeline.
Speaker 1: Okay, because it already happened.
Speaker 3: Because it already happened, because in a way I made
Speaker 3: it happen. I created that loop. And there's something called
Speaker 3: a gin particle. Since you're going there, I'm gonna take
Speaker 3: you all the way? Can you go all the way?
Speaker 3: You got that? Okay? A gin particle is a something
Speaker 3: that was never created nor destroyed. It only exists in
Speaker 3: a time loop. And it's freaky to think about this.
Speaker 3: Do you remember the movie Somewhere in Time. There's a
Speaker 3: love story that Christopher reeves in it. Okay, if not,
Speaker 3: let's go.
Speaker 1: To message in a bottle.
Speaker 3: I no, uh well, let me describe this Somewhere in Time,
Speaker 3: just because it's so romantic. He's a professor at a
Speaker 3: university and an elderly woman comes up to him and
Speaker 3: hands him a beautiful jeweled locket and says, come to me,
Speaker 3: come back to me, and then she disappears, and he
Speaker 3: gathers some information like what is this. He goes to
Speaker 3: a physics professor friend of his and said, she was
Speaker 3: around sixty years ago and she is asking you to
Speaker 3: come visit her. When they're in their twenties. Okay, and
Speaker 3: but I don't know how to time travel, but this
Speaker 3: professor has a way to time travel. So he time travels,
Speaker 3: goes back and meets her. She doesn't know who he is,
Speaker 3: but she said, come back and meet me. So he
Speaker 3: meets her in this like beach hotel and they befriend
Speaker 3: one another. They fall in love, and he so much
Speaker 3: feels for her. He gives her this locket that she
Speaker 3: had given him in the future, and she cherishes that
Speaker 3: until she hands it back to him sixty years later.
Speaker 3: It's a beautiful love story. No action or anything, nor
Speaker 3: chase scenes. It's just a you know it's and so
Speaker 3: that locket was never created nor destroyed. It only exists
Speaker 3: in this look you see what I'm saying. Okay. And
Speaker 3: the Back to the Future Michael J. Fox version of
Speaker 3: that is, I presume we remember this movie. Okay. He's
Speaker 3: at the school dance. Yeah, and he's he's performing Johnny
Speaker 3: be Good and the person who was hired to be
Speaker 3: the band that night is the cousin of Chuck Berry. Okay,
Speaker 3: and so he hears Michael J. Fox's character Marty performed this,
Speaker 3: and he calls up Chuck Berry, Chuck, Chuck, this is
Speaker 3: your cousin Marion or whatever not Marion, Marion Barry was
Speaker 3: your mayor here whatever you guy's name.
Speaker 1: Was, Martin Mark.
Speaker 3: Thank you. I was close, Chuck, Chuck, this is your cousin, Marvin.
Speaker 3: This is that sound you've been looking for. And he
Speaker 3: puts the phone out to the stage and he hears
Speaker 3: Johnny be Good played by Michael J. Fox. There it is.
Speaker 3: Johnny be Good was never written. It exists in this
Speaker 3: time loop.
Speaker 1: Right, And you've only given us two examples in movies.
Speaker 3: I know because because it's a more subtle but for me,
Speaker 3: highly interesting example of how a time line can trap
Speaker 3: something in a loop.
Speaker 1: So that would be a time warp, right.
Speaker 3: No, next week I'm seeing Rocky Horror, I'm brother time
Speaker 3: or anyhow, so time it's fun to talk about time.
Speaker 3: And in the chapter Alien Powers, I explore the powers
Speaker 3: that aliens have had in famous movies and to mind reading,
Speaker 3: and I look at what's the physics of it? How
Speaker 3: would that manifest? What? How what you should be cautious
Speaker 3: of if they can put a thought in your head?
Speaker 1: Game over, well, it feels like that's already happening. But
Speaker 1: it's not aliens, it's just algorithms.
Speaker 3: And so we've already displayed our susceptibility. But if they
Speaker 3: can do that neurologically, game over. So do you know
Speaker 3: what can prevent electromagnetic penetration of your head? A metal
Speaker 3: shield over your head because electromagnetic energy can't pass through
Speaker 3: the metal. Okay, which is tinfoil hat?
Speaker 1: All right, well, I guess you're gonna did you bring
Speaker 1: some of those? I mean it only at an hour,
Speaker 1: then it feels like I talked to you for thirty seconds.
Speaker 1: I think I time warp.
Speaker 3: So the tinfoil hat would resist penetration of electromagnetic energy,
Speaker 3: which is what they would need to use to read
Speaker 3: your mind, because your mind is creating electromenetic We know
Speaker 3: we generate brain waves because you have electrochemical activity in
Speaker 3: the brain, and principle that's readable in principle an advanced
Speaker 3: alien technology. Why wouldn't they just be able to read
Speaker 3: it like that? So, but you can't cheat physics and
Speaker 3: the physics you can't send waves through metal. So the
Speaker 3: tinfoil hat, which of course in the old days was
Speaker 3: made of tin, now it's aluminum. Aluminum foil hat is
Speaker 3: what you would need in order to not have an
Speaker 3: alien either read your mind or implant your mind with
Speaker 3: their thoughts.
Speaker 1: Well, and also it's confusing now because artificial intelligence AI
Speaker 1: has become such a big part of our culture and
Speaker 1: our future, and that's what are It's like AI is
Speaker 1: being blurred or blunted by by other AI. Like now
Speaker 1: we have we have we have self made.
Speaker 3: AI is AI itself. Right, Yeah, So in there I
Speaker 3: talk about a sufficiently intelligent alien would chuckle at our
Speaker 3: AI because for us, our great measure of our AI
Speaker 3: was can you simulate our intelligence? But an alien that's
Speaker 3: much more intelligent than us would just laugh.
Speaker 1: At that, right, do you want to do that?
Speaker 3: I'm way beyond you anyway? How charming that is? Well.
Speaker 1: The book is called Take Me to Your Leader. Perspectives
Speaker 1: on your First Alien Encounter by Neil deGrasse Tyson, blessing
Speaker 1: us with another.
Speaker 3: Work of his Thank you for your interest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm always interested in talking to you. I like
Speaker 1: the way you explain things. Thanks for coming and.
Speaker 3: Enchanted by your curiosity. It's uh, it's it's an educator's
Speaker 3: dream to be surrounded by people who continue to ask
Speaker 3: questions well into adulthood. Long after childhood, because the real
Speaker 3: dip is coming out of elementary school. You go into
Speaker 3: middle school and high school, the kids have such charming
Speaker 3: curiosity and then it goes I think gonads kick in,
Speaker 3: you know, and it's like there's a gap. Maybe it
Speaker 3: resurrects again.
Speaker 1: I think it does in college. I think the classroom
Speaker 1: isn't always the best place for learning for so many people.
Speaker 3: It is, You're right, just the environment, Like sometimes you.
Speaker 1: Just have to like that there's so many other social
Speaker 1: aspects and like things can distract you that you really like,
Speaker 1: I know, like I yeah, I think a lot of
Speaker 1: my friends also feel the same way. Where you become
Speaker 1: curious when it's not when you're not being forced to.
Speaker 3: Maybe okay, because then it would naturally gurgle up within
Speaker 3: you and yeah, being suppressed.
Speaker 1: Or anything about this. Now I have the patience to learn,
Speaker 1: whereas before I was like trying to forget a boyfriend
Speaker 1: in school, I had other things going on. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a pecking order. I was trying to get to
Speaker 1: the top of it. So there's other distractions, right, right,
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: So, so I think a person who retains their curiosity
Speaker 3: through there and into college. I think they're prime to
Speaker 3: become scientists because then the world is your oyster, right
Speaker 3: and and if you care that other people are as
Speaker 3: excited as you, then you become an educator on top
Speaker 3: of that. Love it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is great, awesome.
Speaker 3: Now, I love your work. I love your work right
Speaker 3: back at you. You are you are, Just stay, stay.
Speaker 1: Stay, I'll stay on top of it. I will no
Speaker 1: problem there. Yeah, we do need it, we do, we do.
Speaker 1: It'd be great if I mean, I'm actually looking forward
Speaker 1: to Ailings coming and rescuing us and just like, listen,
Speaker 1: we're so sorry about all of this. We're actually gonna
Speaker 1: take over. I'd be like, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2: If you want advice from Chelsea, right into Dear Chelsea
Speaker 2: podcast at gmail dot com. Dear Chelsea is a production
Speaker 2: of iHeartMedia. Follow Chelsea on all socials at Chelsea Handler,
Speaker 2: and find Katherine on TikTok at flash Cadabra. Dear Chelsea
Speaker 2: is edited and engineered by Brandon Dickert executive producer Katherine Law.
Speaker 2: Find full video episodes and minisodes now on Netflix, and
Speaker 2: get tickets to see Chelsea live at Chelseahandler dot com