So, Chuck, that was fun. Getting those questions from all around the world. Always. We have the smartest listeners of any podcast in the world. I like knowing how different people think from wherever they happen to be. Yeah. You know, and we have the Netherlands, Mexico, Australia, and Arkansas. There you go. The strangest of all places. No. We love you, Arkansas. All right. This is coming up. Cosmic Queries.
You're a place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, you're a personal astrophysicist. Got Chuck Nice with me, Chuck. Yes, Sarah was up. All right. We're doing Cosmic Queries today. Yes, it is. But beyond category. Cosmic Grab Bag. Grab Bag, it. Galactic. Galactic Dumb Goat.
Is Gumbo really just trash that was left over when it was invented? Not when Ivanganyay makes it. I told you I'm going to get you some Ivanganyay gumbo. Let me tell you that. I'm going to take them both to the moon and go, well, I'm going to crawl dad in that boy. I said, Lou, then any moon look here. Oh, man, there was some down room deep.
So this is just so why aren't we sorting them anymore? We just ran they just random. No, because they'd like, you know, there. Sometimes they come in in such a way that. Okay. All right. How they just come in and they make, you know, they're good questions. Just do them all together and let's do answer what I can. There you go. All right. This is Gerage Belonzy. And Gerage says, is it theoretically possible to develop a space drive?
That would have constant acceleration hence creating constant artificial gravity. That's what rockets do. Okay. Okay. But what he means continuous. Like we're going to Mars. Yes. Yes. And so you're burning the entire time that you do that. You'll get there very fast. Like so this nine months journey journey that we talk about going to Mars three days to the moon nine months to Mars. You know what that is? That is aiming for where the object will be when you arrive.
Fire engines enough so you don't fall back to earth. Right. Okay. And you need enough energy to cross over. To where there your destinations gravity exceeds the gravity of earth. Right. So it's basically like like that planet when it gets to that.
It's like climbing to the top of a hill and then you can just roll down the hill. Okay. So you climbing out of the gravitational well of the earth and it's getting weaker and weaker and weaker. But as you're getting towards the other object. It's getting stronger and stronger and stronger. Right.
If you cross over that point, you just fall towards your destination. Correct. Once you launched yourself with enough speed to get there, there's no engines firing. Right. And once you cross over no engines fire, you just fall in. Right. You need your engines again to not crash. Right. Because you're accelerating all the way there by the action of the planet. Right. Right. That tape for to Mars. That's a minimum of nine months.
If instead you accelerated the whole time, then you still want to slow down. So you'll accelerate till you're like halfway there. Then turn around and then decelerate the rest of the time. Captain, we're approaching the planet. Fire the rest of the rocket. You got to fire the rest of the rocket. Yes. This would be a sustained thing. And that way you would maintain a certain artificial gravity because an acceleration of a rocket is an exact mimic mimic of being on a gravitational surface.
So the only sci-fi show I've ever seen that does. And I reccognized it from you telling me exactly what you just said years ago. It's called the expanse. And I had so much respect for them because they show a ship. Headed towards a planet and the engines. You see first firing towards as it's moving towards the planet. So it's like the entire time that they're showing you like oh they're headed to whatever planet.
And then they show you and it looks like the ship is going in reverse. Oh, interesting. Yeah, because but exactly why you said because they're firing the rockets to slow down to approach the planet. Correct. So cool. But there's another interesting fact here while you are firing rockets. There is a force operating on you that you will not be able to distinguish from an ordinary gravitational force.
This was deduced by Albert Einstein in what's called the equivalence principle. The accelerating rocket is indistinguishable from you sitting on earth with Earth's acceleration of gravity. If they two accelerations are equal, right. There's no experiment you can perform other than looking out the window to know if you're in a rocket or sitting here on Earth in a box. Right. Okay. So now what's that movie that had moon pirates? Oh, that was called at asterisk.
At asterisk. That's what's at asterisk. If you're going to use the phrase at asterisk, you might get your stuff correct. That's right. Okay. At asterisk means to the stars in Latin. Right. This is a deep phrase that we've been using in the space community forever. Right. And interestingly, it's on the state flag of Kansas. For the tornado state, that makes sense. That makes sense for the tornado state. I was launched at asterisk. Woo!
So they would show these rockets firing and you go inside the ship and they were all waitless. No. There's this misconception that being in space makes you late. Wait, wait, wait. No. No. No. If you are drifting in space as our space missions do. Right. There's sent in motion and you're drifting towards the crossover point and then you fall in. Oh, there you go. You're waitless that entire time. But as long as you have on rockets, you are not waitless.
Right. At all. Look at that. Yeah. Super cool, man. Yeah. So, yeah. So you could do it, but oh, sorry, getting back to the question. Oh, right. You need filling stations along the way. What? If you're going to drive straight from New York to LA. Oh, right. I'll be sure gas tank big. Well, that's yes. Okay. So you need we have gas stations along the way. So if you really want to accelerate to your destination through space, you need filling stations parked throughout the solar system, right?
And you reload and keep going. Right. But we're not there yet. like in Star Wars where they have the ship that is part of another ship. So there's one ship that gets you to hyperspace, but then when you come out of hyperspace, your ship leaves that ship and then you can just ride normal. Okay, so something else did all the heavy lessons. Yeah, yeah, okay. Cool, man. Very, very cool, Gerage. Thanks for the question. Here's Ryan. Oh, I just want them there. Go ahead.
When you're in orbit, you're freely falling towards Earth. There are no rockets keeping you in orbit. You're just falling around the Earth. Around the Earth. And so your weightless there. It's not because you are, there's no gravity in space. Right. Right, we have the, it's a delusion, not a delusion. We've been misled to think that the act of being in space is synonymous with being weightless. No, that's not. Just when you're on that, what's it called? The vomit comet? What's that thing called?
Vomit comet? Yeah, yeah. The airplane. The airplane. Yeah, yeah, it goes into a controlled, into a parabolic dive where you're falling towards Earth. Exactly. Basically for that short period, for that short bit, it's sort of orbiting Earth. Right. Did you have physics in high school? They taught it in my school. They taught it in my school. Okay, I should have. Did you learn physics? I was sorry. Yes, I did. That was a two different question.
One of the things you learn is that a projectile has a parabolic arc. Right. Okay? And there's a formula for a parabola and you can solve how far, neglecting air resistance, you can know how far a projectile will go. First use of computers. Yes, in fact, it was the first military. For the military. They want to know what a bomb is going to follow. You got to be able to figure out that the trajectory of the mortar shells. Turns out, it's not actually a parabola. Oh, okay. It's very close. Right.
It's not a parabola. It is the segment of an orbit and elliptical orbit. That's it. If the entire mass of the earth were at its center. That makes sense. Okay? That is so cool. Yes. It's completely. That is so cool. The mass of the earth. Right. Collections to a point to the center and watch this go in orbit around that point. Around that point. That's right. That is so cool. You're okay. So, but it doesn't succeed because Earth gets in the way. Exactly.
But the force is controlling it is what's the mass of the earth and what's its distance from the center of the earth. That's all that matters. It's so. It collapse all the mass there and then you have it. Fantastic. Yeah. So even when you're even when you're and like the space station. You're just falling around. You're falling around the earth. Very, very cool. Very cool, man. All right. Here's Ryan A. Ryan A sits. Hey, Neil. Is he witness protection there? He's Ryan A. Yeah. Exactly.
He says, hey, Neil and maybe Chuck. Would you know something? I don't know. Right. He says, hey, Neil, maybe Chuck. Ryan from Toronto. Here, my question might be obvious. But time dilation has been messing with my mind. As is sure. But no one should be comfortable with time dilation. Right. Yeah. Once you said that a foes time doesn't experience time. It's born and immediately is destroyed. If a foe time from somewhere in the galaxy is born and over time it red shifts as we know foe times do.
How can it both experience a red shift but also be destroyed immediately after creation? Thanks. Love the show. That's a great question. It really, I don't know that I have a good answer for that. I do. Because that's how it is. Because that's how foe times roll. Okay. So what he's saying is if the foe time that's emitted is different from the foe time that you detected were destroyed at the end of its path, then something happened to the foe time.
So if something happened to the foe time, the foe time has to be temporarily aware of that in some way. Right. Well, you asked that question better than he did. I'm thinking that's it. I'm thinking that's what he means. That's pretty sure. That's pretty sure. So we see this. The question is, what does the foe time think happened? Right. Now, since it's emitted at one wavelength and detected at another, I got to think about that. That's something, huh?
Because the foe time would have to say, I'm red shifting. But to even be able to say that, time will lapse. Time will lapse for you. Right. Because you were something yesterday and there's some different. Different. Right. Yep. That's pretty wild. No, I don't have a good answer. You know, who might have answered it is Janet. Yeah, Janet. A friend of the show. Yeah, exactly. She's a cosmologist. Am I called Janet? We got the hotline. Wait, where's the Janet hotline, please?
Can we get Janet on the phone, guys? Can we get Janet on the red phone, am I dead? And that's is that for Janet or is that for or somebody to put that mustache in the sky to call you? Emergency. We have a cosmic emergency. Put the mustache in the sky. Mustache. You know, if this was 150 years ago, everyone would have a mustache and then no one would be talking about my mustache. True, that's true. You'd be like, true. You know, everybody in Civil War had a mustache. And weird ones too.
Like with handlebars. Right. All kinds of crap. Okay. All right, well listen, that's a very good question, Ryan A. And sorry, I'm sorry. And who knows who knows who that is. Sorry, sir. I have to ask the photon. Yeah, wait. I'll get back to him. I'm Nicholas Castella and I'm a proud supporter of Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. All right, this is Amar Shah. Amar Shah says, Greetings. Dr. Tyson, Lorde NICE, this is Amar from Sydney, Australia.
Is it possible mathematically that our universe is on the other side of a black hole and could there be more universes on the other sides of black holes? I think does he mean our galaxy because I have a book on the shelf that goes through the mathematics of what's on the other side of a black hole? Of a black hole. Right. Right. And if you fall in, your time slows down relative to what you just came from. Right. And you will see the entire future history of the universe unfold. Right.
As you go down and emerge, a whole other space time opens up in front of you. That's it. The mathematics of general relativity gives you that. Right. No one has tested this. But general relativity works in all these other ways. And this is a prediction of something that has worked so well. Mm-hmm. It's intriguing. Certainly were the at least sci-fi treatment before we get actual data. So the universe that has the most universes, right, is the universe that has the most black holes? Right.
Now are those, is it a different universe or is it a residual universe? Call it what you will, but there's no, you can't go back and forth. Of course you can. So by our operational definition of universe, you're in another universe. And don't denigrate it by calling it residual, or universe light, or dwarf universe. Okay. I got you. All right. I didn't mean to, you know, it mean to peel the universe. No telling well happened. There's that. Well, that's very cool.
So mathematically it does work out. Yes, that's how it works. Mathematically, mathematically. All right, cool. This is Edwardo. Oh, by the way, the horizon of the universe has, this is beyond which you cannot see. Okay, has all the same properties as the event horizon of a black hole? Oh, so cool. So what we see is the edge of our universe that we can observe as all the same properties as the same mathematical properties as the event horizon of black hole.
Wow. So we would be living evidence of a universe inside of black hole. That's great. That's, it's, it's, it's, that is, that's good. Somebody give me an edible. Apparently you didn't need one. This is true. This is, we, this is true. We, we, we, we, we, we was sufficiently fascinating enough that I did not need I wouldn't think the assistance. Be correct. And have my mind blown, but no assist. Right. Fact. Yeah. Mm-hmm. That's cool. All right, this is Edwardo Mancilla.
Hello, this is Edwardo, writing from Mexico. What should I say? Hello, this is Edwardo. This is writing from Mexico. I don't, normally I would reserve that for our friend from Monterey. Monterey. Monterey. It says, you heard that, that dinosaur joke, so they stupid joke. So I was giving a public talk and I was describing the 65 million year ago event where Earth got hit by an asteroid. And we found where the crater is. It's off the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula.
OK, OK. Mexico. And I thought it'd be cute and say, you could tempt an issue of Mexico, but that's not what the dinosaur was called in. Because it was. And then someone in the audience, they called it Mexico. That was like stupid funny. Yeah, it is. I mean, clearly they spoke Spanish. Right, right. Exactly. And they would pronounce it correctly. All right, so Edwardo says, I saw a video on Strange Matter. But I didn't quite understand what exactly that is.
Could you maybe talk a little bit about what it is and how it forms Strange Matter? Yeah, I saw, I'm not up on the very latest there, but there's actually good precedent for having this mysterious thing happen in our particle accelerators. And we say, we can't explain this. There must be some particle we haven't discovered yet, accounting for this inexplainable stuff.
This behavior of the other particles, they're responding to something that we can't see and don't know how to figure out how to detect it yet. So let's invent the idea of this particle. Doing that has enabled the discovery of multiple particles. Assume something's there. Right. What would its properties be to cause all the confusion that it does? Right. Let's look for it. And then look for it. And we found it. Okay. The neutrino was one such particle. Look at that. All right.
There was a reaction of particles. And at the end, the charge all worked out, but the momentum didn't add up. So we have a long and conservation momentum has never been violated. Right. All right. There's missing some momentum. Way to go. All the same we took account of all the particles. Right. And somebody said a particle must have taken away the momentum. I don't know where to look for it. We knew it didn't have a charge. So it was called little neutral one. Little neutral one. Neutrino.
Oh cool. Yeah. Yeah. So there are things we cannot explain dark matter, dark energies. There are these phenomena in the universe where we are kind of, I don't know. I want to say we're giving up. But we'll say, we don't know what it is. Okay. Just call it anything. Okay. So some new kind of matter. Is it strange matter? Is it? And there's a whole catalog of names for these particles that are not yet discovered. And many of them are fanciful. Wow. So it's a fun, it's like a zoo.
So is that like missing spaces in the periodical chart? Oh, very nice. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Very nice analogue there. All right. Because that's complete now. It's right. You know, on many things you can say, we got this. We got it. Move on to the next problem. Right. We got this. Right. But there was a time when they had to leave a space. They were late. They know something. Don't go there. Right. And you know, one of them was discovered. I forgot exactly when. But it was not discovered in nature.
We had to make it. Oh, right. Okay. Do you know the word for when you make something? Manufacturer. Yeah. Okay. Tech. Tech. Tech. Technology is you made it. You didn't get it from nature. Right. Okay. We forgot that because it applies to everything today. Tech. Okay. So it's called Technician. Ignacio. Yep. We made that. We made that element. That's pretty cool. So if all these hypothetical forms matter. Right. All right. One of them has been named for a variety of quirk.
Okay. That we know quarks have fanciful names. Yeah. Okay. There's an up quirk. Right. Down quirk. A strange quirk. A charmed quirk. Okay. Well, a line quirk. Oh, my quirk. Quirk. Oh, quirk. Quirk. Quirk. Quirk. Okay. Okay. Quirk. So what are the quarks make up our nuclear particles? Right. Okay. So there's an up-down top-bottom strange charmed. Okay. Okay. So the up-down are the quarks that make up protons and neutrons.
Okay. They have heavier components in the universe that we find in accelerators. But we don't encounter them every day. Okay. So all the particles that we know and love have versions that exist at a higher energy level. Yes. So our quarks are up and down. The next level quarks are top and bottom. Mm-hmm. Because they're pairs. And the next level quarks are strange and charmed. That's true. There's three levels of electrons as well. That's true. Three different kinds of force carriers.
So this is what we call the standard model. Yeah. We chat about that with… Right. …grangreen, right? Yeah. It's been hypothesized that the strange quark under certain conditions of pressure temperature would manifest and be the predominant particle in the object. Okay. So it'll be strange matter possibly making a strange star. Yeah. But don't overinterpret the word strange. It's just a word to describe a variety of quark. And you know where the word came from? Top and bottom quark?
From the core community. The quark community. It's… Stop. Okay. Cancel him, okay? No. What are you talking about? I'm an advocate. Okay. I'm okay with you talking about. I'm an ally. So… Yeah. Okay. That's for me. The word quark comes from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Really? Yes. Oh, okay. Oh, so. Because we found that there were three quarks in the middle of the proton and neutron. Right. Okay. Okay. Three. And there's some rhyme in Finnegan's Wake that says, three quarks for Mustermark.
And so Murray Gohman, who's one of the original physicists to think about what the particles are in the tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny part of… He had that phrase in his head. And then he says three quarks for Mustermark. And so it was three… Because of number three, is it okay? Except there's more than three, there's like, you know, two varieties times three, there's six, six kinds of quarks. So the numbers in the end don't match up. Well, he didn't know it. He didn't know it. He didn't know it.
He just started. Yeah. He just began the investigation. Oh, hell yeah. The word quark stayed. Okay. Yeah. It's dumb name. All right. Well, you can't say what does it look like? Right? That's true. I mean, in my field, we see a nebula that looks like a tarantula. We call it the tarantula nebula. Right. We see another nebula. It looks like North America. It was called the North American nebula. That's so crazy. If you see a quark, what are you going to say it looks like?
Well, there is nothing that… Don't say it. There's nothing to say. It's a little bit… You can't. Right. Right. Oh, that's cool. Okay. I take it back. We do have that problem. Mustermark. If you ask me, how big is the universe? Well, how big is the universe? It's as big as… End of sentence. There you go. Because… Oh, because you know… Right. Right. You can't… It is the biggest. You can compare it. Yeah. There's nothing to compare it.
I can tell you how many feet we'll go across it, but that's still a dozen things. There's no reference. There's no reference. Right. Okay. Let's move on to Maurice van der Linden. It says… Where is it from the Netherlands? It could be. Van der Linden here. Van der Linden from Rotterdam. Hello. This is Maurice van der Linden from Rotterdam. They don't speak like that. I don't know what they say. That's her. I mean, I've been there several times so I still don't know what they speak.
They speak Dutch. So, you know, they sound… Anyway, he says, Dear Cosmos connoisseurs. Maurice van der Linden from the Netherlands here. No, it's from the Netherlands. He was from the Netherlands. Wanting to know more about gas giants. Why are they named that way? Oh, come on Maurice. Come on Maurice. No, maybe he's… Let's keep read. I am a keep read. No, don't they… Okay, you look at you, keep reading. If you don't they have a solid core and gaseous atmosphere, the same as terrestrial planets.
Love the show, keep it up. So in other words, why can't we just call them, you know, a bigger atmosphere planets? Because… Here we go. No, when you get the… When you get the… Tyson… Don't make me… Don't make me do this. No, you about to get read. Here's why. He's tell you why. The difference is… On Earth… Earth's atmosphere is… So the solid planet… What the skin of an apple is to an apple. That's you. Whereas on the gas giants… Their atmosphere is to their solid core. What a peach is to its pit.
Okay. That makes sense. Okay. I got what you're saying. Because I mean, we have… Our atmosphere is gas. So it is gas. It is still gas, but… Any much of it. But it has nothing to really do with what we are if you were to really look at it. Well, structurally… Structurally. I mean, it matters for a life in our ecosphere and everything. No, no, I'm saying if you were to take it away, we would still be a giant rock floating in space. Correct. There you go. Correct.
You take away the atmosphere of the giant gas giants. Right. There'd be unrecognized… That's nothing. Right, you could. Correct. It's… Right. So a peach to its pit or smaller than a pit. Right. I'm trying to think of what's a good analog there. Like an apple to a seed. Yeah, but that's more seeds and an apple to a seed. Correct. I know what you're saying. Right, right, right. You're such a science. I was thinking, You know what I mean?
Seriously, you just can't let an apple have one fricking seed. Okay. Everybody know what to see. I didn't know what to see. No, you're like, no, you could have an apple open. And you got six seeds in there. So we got to have one seed. I'm educator man. Okay. And I've had some avocados lately. All right. They had really small pits. So somebody's breeding them things to be little. Yeah. Like when we grew up… No, they were giant. Giant.
So maybe avocado one day just have a tiny little pin or I'll be flesh on the outside. That'd be like the gas giants. Right. Yeah. So he's right to think, Yes, they have a solid core. Right. But it's a tiny thing way down inside. Right. And let me ask this on a follow up from Marisa. No, though, is that tiny core solid because of all the pressure that the gas makes? They are made out of the same ingredients as we are. Oh. It might be precise. Okay. Okay. All right.
The original nebula that formed the sun and the planets. Okay. It's gas. Right. Mixed with heavy elements. Right. But they're just gatches heavy elements. Okay. The gas giants, when they form, where do the heavy elements go? In the center. Thank you. And they make a solid mass there. The lighter elements go up to the top, especially the hydrogen in the helium. And it has enough gravity to hold onto them. They're moving fast, but they're not going to escape because the gravity is strong.
That's it. For Earth, where do the heavy elements go? To the center. How about the gas? The lighter gases, the two lightest gases are hydrogen and helium. They're moving the fastest at any given temperature. To fascinating law first discovered by James Clark, Max Well. Okay. We should do. We should talk about that. Oh, James Clark, Max Welling distribution of velocities. Ooh. Let's do an explainer on that. We will. No, it's very cool. All right. Really cool. I'm about it. Okay. You got it.
Cool. Okay. Put a pin in that. Okay. All right. Good. So we're here. We're trying to hold on to the hydrogen in helium. The way Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune did. But we can't because our gravity is strong. And gravity. And it all just escapes back up. And it just escapes back up. Okay. That's really cool. So we stuck with the heavy gas. It was oxygen, nitrogen. Right. And carbon dioxide. Okay. So that's how that works. That's how that works. Excellent. Yeah. Oh, man, that was great.
Okay. Cool. I like when we go with simple stuff. And of course within the solid core, the heavier stuff is in the center of the solid core. Right. Right. And what's in our solid core? We got iron there. And iron is heavier than everything. Everything. What's heavier than the rock? Right. Rock and float. Compared to iron. Compared to iron. Yeah. All right. Super cool, man. This is Vasco Vukov. And Vasco Vukov says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Mr. Nice. This is Vasco Vukov from Sophia Bulgaria.
We're trying to find Ali. But if we want to hide from them, what should we and could we do even if they point their sensor straight towards us? How stealth could the Earth possibly be? I love that. Okay. So no watch. Okay. All right. You ready? Yeah. Okay. Let's go back in time. TV signals. Right. The reason why you, the old timers, everyone else just won't care what I'm about to say. In the day, you could get radio stations from cities that were far away. But you wouldn't get TV stations.
TV waves, you have to be in a direct sight line to the television transmitter. Okay. So you have to have a transmitter everywhere for TV. So TV was very local in the day. Radio waves, okay, especially short wave, but also AM radio. Its waves had the right frequency to reflect off the ionosphere of the Earth. And it could move, it could send a signal beyond Earth's horizon. That's crazy. Okay. Some would leak, but others would bounce back. Right.
Point is, these modes of communication had leakage, especially television waves. So someone eavesdropping on Earth, and there let's say 80 light years away, they're getting the earliest radio signals that have been emanating from Earth at the speed of light. Good evening, Mr. Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea. Date line. And there's how did you do it? Right. There was, uh, and then the TV signals would start coming in. Early TV, the honeymooners.
If they want to decode our civilization, right, they think that we're all abusive who like to threaten our wives with violence. With violence by to the moon or to the moon. And that's when people laughed at that. Right. Exactly. Right. I think they left because she was defiant even in the face of that threat of violence. Oh my god, you're so funny. You're going to beat your wife, huh? Right, right, right. Exactly. It's crazy times. It's crazy. Great, crazy times.
So that's how to learn how many women interact. That's the adventure work. So this continues throughout all the sitcoms and all TV and they'll see the war, the war broadcasts and everything. And then they get right up to puff Daddy and they go, nothing has changed. They get to the 1980s and signals start disappearing. Uh-oh. What the heck is happening? People are using cable. That's right.
Okay. So one of the earliest shows which I feared would be first seen by aliens, but I think we're protected is Beavison Butthead. Right. That was MTV and you got that via cable. Right. Okay. That was not transmitted into space. Oh, that's a shame. You want the aliens? Let me tell you something. The one thing I want the aliens to see is Are you threatening me? I am the great collulio. Capuchino. Capuchino. Oh, I'm ready. What are you doing? I'm ready.
So a lot of what's happening today is protected from leakage. Right. Right. Because it's a closed system. It's a closed system. It's cable. Right. Okay. That's it. Uh-oh. So that's my first point. Second point. Here's just an interesting fact. If you're communicating through space and you have a signal, you don't want anyone to intercept it. Okay. You want to encrypt it.
Right. Okay. The perfect encryption is so well encrypted that it is indistinguishable from the din of radio noise in the universe. Oh, that is. Now that is awesome. That is totally because think about it. Think about it. You're using the phone. The phone. Think about it. If there was something about your signal that was different, then I would know somebody created it. Exactly. Okay. So you need something to encrypt it so that it looks like noise and you have the noise decoder on the other side.
Look at that. Okay. And when you say noise, you're talking about the cosmic microwave background. I need the all of the radio noise in the universe. Okay. If you take a radio antenna pointed anywhere, there's like noise. Right. Of course. Yeah. Okay. That's the static. The static. Yeah. Okay. So if I see something that doesn't look like the static, there's a signal there. Even if it's even if it is encoded. Right. I know there's a signal there. Yeah. Because it's different from the static.
Right. So the perfect encodings that would be indistinguishable from static. That's so if a planet wanted to hide right from alien eavesdropping, they would make sure that all signal transmission was so thoroughly encoded that it was indistinguishable from static. That's like the noise of the universe. Correct. That's great. Yes. That is really great. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. And now it's a little tough because you might have more noise here than somewhere else. Right. That could give you away.
Right. Right. There's the background data and then there's a bright noise. That's right. So there's an anomaly of noise. Of noise. Of noise. Yeah. Right. So you have to figure that one out too. Yeah. Yeah. But that's cool though. Yeah. It's very cool. Another way to hide from aliens. Yeah. You get one generation of astronomers to send a plaque out into space. Right. Intended to be read by aliens. This is a plaque from Pioneer 10 and 11. Right.
Which was launched in the 1970s and some of this iconography was also used for the Voyager missions. Right. But notice at the bottom there's the solar system. There's the solar system. There's the sun and the mercury. Venus, Earth, and Earth is a line coming from Earth. Right. That shows where this space comes from. Because this is a this is a life size of the spaceship relative to the two human figures. That's true.
Okay. So you get one generation to try to talk to aliens innocently not knowing the aliens are evil through going to come and suck our brains out. Right. But let them show a nine planet solar system. Right. Yeah. This one has Pluto. Right. They're going to come looking for us because this is our return address by the way. Right. Spider diagram. That's our distance to pulsars in the galaxy. You can triangulate on that and come right back to our vicinity. Why would we do that?
In the why would we ever do that? It seems like a good idea at the time. That's insane. I know you wouldn't give your email to a another human stranger in the street. That's not going on vacation and putting all your plans on social media. Hey, guess what? We're leaving on the 10th and we'll be gone for two weeks. That's the perfect time to come rob my house people. So now they come back looking for a nine planet solar system and ours is not that. We're okay.
And the reason why would they not think it because Pluto is represented in this as a planet as the same size as like Mercury and other other objects here and it's just not. Guys, we only see a plan is here. We got the wrong one. There you go. At the wrong solar system. Let's see here. Nothing to go. Keep going. All right. Except for that one planet with all the trash out on this front lawn. What is the what's going on there? No sign of intelligence. But turning home. All right. Planet Zebula.
All right, this is a Latissa Davis. She says, hey, this is a Latissa Davis from Conway, Arkansas. So how many early cosmic discoveries were made by curious observers with no formal training? Is the frontier still within the reach of amateurs or has signs advanced too far for a layperson that contribute to the cosmic perspective? Love that. Wow, look at that. Very good. Very good. All right. Let's see. So let me give something that's not an answer to that.
Just yet because I just want to put it out there. I wrote an essay many moons ago called Sticking the Mud Astronomy. I think it's online. Sticking the mud astronomy. Okay. If you have a stick and you put it in the ground, right? What can you deduce about the operations of the universe from just a stick in the ground? Okay. You can invent a a sundial. You contract rising and setting points of the sun on the horizon and the moon and all of this. Okay. So you can go you can do quite a bit.
It was an homage to ancient people who didn't have telescopes. Right. There's a whole essay on that called Sticking the Mud Astronomy. All right. Without access to frontier telescopes, you're not going to discover dim things. Right. Because you're not going to ever see him. Can't see him. Can't see him. However, there are more amateur astronomers in the world than there are professional astronomers. Right. Yeah. And they all have like back yard telescopes. That's fine. Very accessible.
They're looking up all the time. Amateur astronomers have famously and historically discovered comets. Right. Discovered supernova, although we have supernova surveys now that are very efficient. You might not be un-inline for that. But if you see something, say something. Okay. We have a clearinghouse because phenomena that comes and goes. Mm-hmm. We don't know about. Right. Right. We can't.
We, we, we, I have a telescope for one night and I'm looking and I go, that's why we have the Vera Rubin Telescope, which is basically going to be basically going to be taking video of the universe of the whole sky. So you can watch in case something shows up and goes away or disappears. You know, it also will discover every one of Elon Musk's satellites coming across. That'll contaminate the data where we're trying to find out if there's an asteroid with our name on it.
So I'm a little worried about that. So like Elon. So like him. He he he. So what else you can do is you can end their, their, their, their coordinated groups that invest this effort. Their asteroids, well, we don't know how big they are. Hmm. Okay. We don't have good sort of radar to asteroids. Right. So if we think an asteroid is going to come in front of a star and blot out its light and you have people lined up on Earth to watch this. Because how big are asteroids?
There's 100 meters across, few kilometers across, hmm, mile across, whatever. It's not thousands of miles across. Right. So you line people up on Earth and some will not see the light of the star dim. Right. And other people will. Yeah. Yeah. On each side. So only a narrow path of people will see the light dim. And that can tell you the size of the asteroid. Hmm. But you can, we don't, they're not enough amateur astronomers to do this.
So everybody's got to line up, watch the object, keep good time, and do this. So yes, there's still things to do. But also, we have the Citizen Science Projects. We're a wash and data. Yes. And we say we're looking for this, help us. I mean, we might put AI on it, but sometimes the human touch matters. And because not all AI is human yet. And so yes, there are ways you can still contribute. Very cool. There you go. Okay. Last one. Real quick. All right. This is Shirahi Raivi, who says greetings.
Dr. Tyson Lorde Nice. Currently reside in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. I am a researcher in a graduate student in astrophysics. What possible aspects of our current model of the Big Bang Theory do you feel will be revised considering the contradictions to the same by the latest James Webb Space Telescope observations? So the Big Bang is supported by so many different lines of evidence that if our galaxy models don't match what we see, chances are it's problem with the galaxy models.
Yeah, right. Not the Big Bang itself. Not the Big Bang itself. The way we've modeled the Earth. The modules are embedded within a much larger matrix of observations and data that have been affirmed by measurements over decades. So we think we understand galaxies with the whole point of the James Webb telescope was to observe galaxies being born. Right. Because we don't fully understand that process.
If we take what we think galaxies should be like and they don't match it, you don't say toss out the whole Big Bang. You say maybe our understanding of galaxies is flawed. There you go. But saying our understanding of galaxies is flawed is very different clickbait from we need to rethink the Big Bang. Right. And so that's what roll cut up in here. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. Clickbait. Right. That's it. That's what he expect. Yeah, exactly. It's the same as the Batboy headlines.
You know, oh, but from the old days, the Batboy found it. It's like a boy half boy half bat. Right. So I forgot all about those. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was the original clipbait. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. All right. That's all we have time for. All right. Well, that was fun. Knock out another one there. That was fun. Okay. Got from all over Sydney everywhere. And the Netherlands, the Netherlands. We're global, baby. All right. I'm making it. Always good to have you, man.
Always a pleasure. All right. This has been a start talk cosmic queries from my office here at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.