Cosmic Queries – From Wine to Wormholes

Chuck, people have been asking genius level questions on Cosmo Queries. Yeah, I'm I think they're using AI. No, no, no, no. AI is not that smart. That's true. Our listeners are smarter than AI. Yes, they are. More on that. Coming right up. Welcome to Star Talk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. Star Talk begins.

Star Talk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, you're a personal astrophysicist. Chuck, nice, I got with me here. That's right. What's up, Neil? Chuck, you were just make it clear, you were not born my co-host. No, I was not born in the streets. I was born the son of a sharecropper. We're gonna do another Cosmo queries.

Yes. A grab bag edition. This is becoming a fan favorite. People love it. That's okay because we can ping pong anywhere we want in cosmos. It means I I might not know stuff and I'm you know. That's yet to happen. I mean All right. There's something to shoot for here now. Okay. Let me aid from not knowing something. Exactly. All right. So let's go. Okay, let's get to it. Uh this is Natasha Shaw Davis. Good evening, Doctor Tyson and honorable

Uh Paul his goofiness. Oh Paul. Paul Paul McCurio. Paul McCurio. Baron Paul McCuririo. Oh, okay. Apparently Baron um Baron McCoy. You were expecting him. Yeah. Not Lord, but Baron. Okay. So people are expecting Paul for this episode. Yes, that's what you do with Paul. Um listen Is he locked in your trunk? Paul could not be with us today.

I'm just saying. Is he in your trunk? Right. And if you hear if you hear muffled screams coming from the closet. All right. All right. He says, uh Natasha says this. Um Natasha from New Mexico here. Eyes see some wiggles in matter and ears hear a little more, but the whole body experiences gravity. If you could pick any organ to deliberately experience the graviton, what would you pick? My heart. oh my god that was so sweet

Because my heart has its requisite number of beats per minute. Right. And it goes up when you get excited or you exercise and it calms down. So the heart is with you in your emotional moments. Correct. So if a graviton Or gravitational wave. Right. washed over me or passed through me, I'd want my heart to participate in that. Oh my heart as the graviton detector. Oh that's I have to tell the heart wants

what the heart wants. And apparently it's a Graviton. That's the geek dating app. That's the geek dating. Swipe right for Graviton.

That's cool. All right. She says this is Bev from Atlanta from Alabama. Will we ever be able to cultivate the right terrier for wine other than earth? Thank you for gifting us with your insights. In other words, will we be able to grow a vineyard on another planet? Okay, you're gonna have to back and read that. If you're gonna pretend like you know anything about wine, you have to pronounce the words right.

Terroi. Terroir. Okay. Okay. Here we go. Will we be able to cultivate the right terroir? You don't have to like gutter gutterize into the microphone. Exactly. I have to I have to say the word like I'm uh Sylvester Stallone. Uh will we be able to cultivate the right Darrow for wine other than herb? Really. So what's uh I guess I think the answer is no.

Right. Can I tell you why? But first, terroir is a French word that we don't have an English counterpart to. Clearly. It's not the first of such words. Yeah. Uh you know another word we don't have for? Go ahead. Uh uh light fixture in the middle of the room that has crystal and multiple lights hanging out. Chandelier. We don't have a word for that. No, we don't. You know why? 'Cause we're not nearly as pretentious as the French.

And nobody in colonial America had a chandelier. Okay. Turn on the light. That's right. Right, exactly. We had a single bulb on a pixie. Not in colonial America did they have bulbs. That's true. True. Gas lamps. Yeah, okay. I'll give you a gas lamp. It'd probably whale blubber oil. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So wine doesn't grow in most places on earth. That's right. And if there's ever a place where they're growing hops to make beer, it's because they could not grow grapes to make wine. Oh.

Wow, you really dissed beer just. No, I'm just tapping Man, you just threw a lot of shade on beer. You're like the only reason you're able to drink beer is cause that crap is not as good as wine. Because th th the economics of it. Okay. It's economy it's economics. Okay. And I d I didn't invent this Datum. Right. Okay. All right. Singular of data. All right. Datum. Datum. Right. It's datum if you can. If you can grow the gr ingredients for beer or the ingredients for wine.

The people choose the grapes. And I I I I I'm guessing it's cause it's more profitable. I was gonna say grapes have more uses than hot. And so that as well, of course. Yeah. Yeah. So So around the world, the places where you can grow successful wine is so rare than to say, well, Earth can grow wine, right? So can another planet. Yeah, I'm I'm not feeling that. Right. Not only that, the moon has a

Surface but it's not soil. We s we might call it that, but it's not. You know what it is? No. It's pulverized rock. Right. Micrometeorites that don't stop in the atmosphere because there is no atmosphere. Worst restaurant ever. No atmosphere. Yeah. Hits the rock, pulverizes it, turns it into lunar dust. The geologists call that the regolith. The regolith. Which is powderized rock. Yeah. Plants don't like

Rock. No, they don't. They like soil. Soil. Right. So and same with Mars. Mars doesn't have so our soil has living organisms in it that make it this thing that plants like. So I'm thinking wine might be unique to Earth and the universe. Wow. No, no, no. Think of it another way. Some other planet will have some other thing unique to it. Exactly. And then we become trading partners. There you go. Right. Right. We didn't make silk, they made it in the Far East.

Make the Silk Road. Right. We made something else they want. So y w we will give them wine and they will give us space heroin. Like, oh man. I thought wine was good. The wine high holds nothing on her opium high. Yeah. All right. So yeah, I said I'm I'm gonna take No, I I think everything else. Everything you said tracks though. Uh earth is is earth and no wine.

Climate and soil. That's it. That's it. And the climate change that's happening has affected where you can grow wines. Absolutely. As a matter of fact. There's a couple of degree change in the thing. And it ruins or helps. Right. It can either ruin or hell. On on such small changes. Exactly. And as a matter of fact, like I think uh

I don't know what wine it is, but they are growing in certain parts of England now. Oh they've they've grown champagne in England. Yeah, champagne. Oh you can't say champagne. No, th'cause you can only say champagne if it is from Champagne. You cannot say, I will arrest you. Someone called the ballistic said that it is from Champagna. It is not from Champagne.

It is not. And you cannot say it's from Burgundy. It's unless it's from Burgundy. Exactly. It's a gallo Hardy Burgundy. Right. That was a flavor that they had. Right. Flavor. That was a brand of wine. Hardy Burgundy. No. Plus if you say you you smoke marijuana, okay, you can't say that. Unless it comes from the marijuana section of France. Otherwise it's just sparkling oregano.

I didn't know where you were going with that. Man, you had me. You had me lock stocking bro. I was like, what the hell is he doing right now? Where's he going? Where's he but okay. Yeah, that was good. Sparkling oregano. Okay, I like it. That was good. All right. This is you know the planet could have those jokes. Yes. Right. Right. Exactly. There it is. Okay. But you need the French. to be a part of the culture of how you're gonna make fun of that. Listen, without the French

Nothing works. It's a boring world. It's a boring world. Okay. World sucks without the French. Sucks more with him, but Shaq. He's a comedian. Guys come on. He's a comedian. Stop it. I'm joking. I love the French. Go.

All right, this is Sasha 975 who says, Hello everyone. Sasha from Germany here. How big could telescopes really get if we could manufacture them in space? Could we use an array of telescopes? Wow. This is been on our mind for decades. Yes. Decades. And so What you ha what you wouldn't make a single big dish because that's not realistic. Right. But we figured out.

using engineering and complex mathematics. Okay. Literally complex mathematics. So in the complex plane of of imaginary numbers and uh you can create a a so here's how you do it. You can put a telescope over here and a telescope over here. If they observe the same object and you have it exactly timed and you know what then you can combine them As though you had a a dish or a mirror that was as big as the separation between them.

Very good. But that takes some some fancy math to make that work. Okay. And timing and the like. Okay. And so anytime you see an array of radio telescopes. Yes. You could use them individually, but generally we don't. Right. They're used in harmony. Yeah. And it's as though you had a dish the size of In fact, we do better than that. We we have the uh a a a a string of these dishes.

And as Earth rotates, you can fill in the the the area with more observations to improve your data. And so in space. where there is no stress load, because if it's orbiting, then it's just weightless. There's no stress load on the equipment, then nothing stops how big you can make this wreck. We're thinking if we're gonna detect certain wavelengths of gravitational waves, you need detectors detector the di the diameter of the Earth. Right. Or the Earth Moon. Right. Or maybe

Earth to Earth in its orbit around the sun. Wow. The wavelengths of energy reaching us don't stop at just the size of our detectors. Right. Make a bigger detector. You're gonna be sensitive to a different kind. uh of energy headed our way. So for a while, NASA had plans for the SIM. Sim is a space video telemetry. Where you create a character and it walks around. Is that what how that works? You'd be like mayor of the city. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I I never got it. You never got it? Okay. Never understood it. And then like Godzilla would walk through every now and then. You had to repair everything. Yeah, that I understand. And I said, this is stupid. Well Godzilla's not even real. And then like Stuff can happen to us. There can be a fire.

There could be a terrorist attack. Yeah. It's it's Godzilla. Yeah. If you wanna listen, my thing is this. If you wanna play God, have children. Yeah, you're playing God of the sense. You're playing God with the sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, space Interferometry mission. Interferometry mission. telescopes and bring'em together as one

Telescope. Right. Okay. So this one was gonna one of them was like on a rigid bar. I I'm I'm dredging memory now because it's from decades ago. One was on a rigid bar that was very large. But then we figured you can station keep with like lasers. So the rigid bars so you always know how far away they are from each other. But if you use lasers and you just always measure how far

Because what matters is that you know how far away they are. Right. Not necessarily that it's the constant distance. Right. So if I always know, because I have laser uh measures, then you could in principle create one of these telescopes in space as big as you wanted. Wow. They could beam across Earth Earth orbit, Earth's diameter, Earth to Moon. And there's a lot of talk of radio telescopes.

On the back side of the moon, the far side of the moon. Because there's no radio noise coming from us. Earth. Right. Earth. We are noisy, radio noisy place. Yeah. Yeah. So You never heard anybody knocking on the atmosphere? Like keep it down. Damn it, I gotta work tomorrow. The aliens cut up your record. So yes, space, we've thought a lot about it. Right. And it's a matter of you need there's funding, you have to maintain it.

Uh you know, it's not just the cost of building it. There's every year there's there's you gotta maintenance it. Yeah. There's the usage of it, which which okay. But also if something goes wrong

If it's in Earth orbit, you can get back to it. But if it's out in space like the James Webb telescope, something goes wrong there. That's it. We're done. We ain't going. It's a million miles on the e far or farther than the moon. We ain't go we're not sending people there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Something goes wrong with the James Webb. I say AI go out there and fix it. Oh, we don't know how to make a spaceship. Oh, you need a human for that? Let's not let's not tempt AI.

I got a feeling. All right, this is Michelle H. She says, Hi Neil, hi Paul. This is Michelle in Calgary, Alberta. My question is short and sweet. If Jupiter stopped rotating on its axis. If Jupiter stopped rotating on its axis, How would that aff how would Earth be affected? Please pick my question and give me a thrill of a lifetime thanks, P. S.

I'll understand if you don't don't work against yourself, Michelle. You know, I don't know how Paul runs his operation, but I would never do that too. Paul McCurio? That's right. Okay. That's a curious question. Yeah. Does it work? Okay. So I mean, we wouldn't be here without Jupiter anyway. Jupiter's like a big brother. Yeah. Yeah. So Yeah, big brother who swats away comets that might have headed

To the inner solar system, wreaking havoc upon the stability of life on Earth. Yeah, man. And Jupiter says, No, you don't. Yep. It's a bodyguard. Earth's bodyguard. Jupiter has more mass than all other planets combined, including Saturn. Wow. And Saturn is big. Yeah. So if you come through, you're feeling Jupiter. Yeah. All right. So turns out As far as I have ever calculated, and everything I know about the laws of physics and gravity and motion.

Jupiter's rotation has no effect on anything else in the solar system. Wow. Nothing else cares. Nothing else cares. But what would happen? Okay. Jupiter has storms. Yes. There's the famous red spot. That just stays there. It's a it's a it's a it's a cyclone. It's b it's a swirl. And it's red in the gas colorations and it's been there at least since

Galileo or shortly after. Hundreds of years. Right. It's been sustained. And it's the same storm. Unless it just disappears when nobody's looking and then comes back. So so these These weather circul circulations are a product of the rotation of the planet. Okay. If the planet's same thing here. Yeah, same thing here. Same thing here. Is how you get hurricanes, tornadoes. Absolutely. I think you could Artificially drum up a tornado if you had to, but left to its own causes, tornadoes

You get those from Earth rotation. Same with hurricanes and uh typhoons, all of these storm systems are caused by Earth rotation. So Jupiter, which rotates twice as fast as Earth. Okay. Twice as fast. And it's w you know how big we are? We are the size of one of its storms. Oh man. Yeah, we we ain't nothing in it. So we we ain't we ain't how how do we

How are we so how do we have this hubris that we have? I know, I know. How do we think we're so damn great? I know. I know. It's sad. Yeah. It's sad. Like we're bigger we're not even as big as a rainstorm on another planet. Right. Right. And the sp the blemishes on the sun, the sunspots, those each one of those is larger than all of Earth. The spots on the sun. So the liver spots.

I'm not a star. I'm not aged in the stars. So so all the storms will go away. Right. And so a surface would be much less interesting. Yeah. If it stopped rotating. Right. Jupiter Has a magnetic core? Oh right. Here's something interesting. I don't know how good your memory is. Okay. Uh do you remember high school chemistry? Nope.

You could pretend. Okay. Let's pretend. Do you remember your high school chemistry? Oh sure, yeah. That was great. Okay. The periodic table of elements in the front of the room. Mm-hmm. Hydrogen. Appeared twice. Right. I do remember that. Do you remember? Yes. Because it is, wait a minute.

It's the gas and the something else. It could behave like a metal. It can be like it's gas and metal. Or it can behave like both. Yes. Right. And you say, what? How do you What? How's this a what? It's not a metal. It's a gas. Okay. Under pressure? Right. It behaves like a metal. Right. Okay. And in the center of Jupiter, mm-hmm, because Jupiter's gaseous and it's mostly hydrogen. Right. It's under so much pressure in the middle, it has turned the hydrogen into

An electrically magnetically conductive material, just like a metal. So it's like the iron core of Earth. Correct. Except it's not iron. Except it's not iron. There's a little bit of iron there, but that's not what that's. That's not the right. It's it's the hydrogen. And That means this phenomenon called the dynamo. Right. Dynamo is when you have a rotating system, you can induce currents. in your liquid iron

core that generate a magnetic field. Okay. It's why we have a magnetic field. We have a magnetic field. That's right. It's why the moon does not have a magnetic field. Right. Okay. What a shame. Jupiter has a ferocious magnetic field. Okay. And that would all go away. Wow. Yeah. Oh, that's extraordinary. Well, I'm so glad that it's rotating. Yeah, and it would you would not have Aurora.

It was, you know,'cause we're not the only ones in town who have Aurora. Right. You know, with solar particles uh gather and collect at the poles. because they see the magnetic field and get driven in and collide with the air kicking it to higher energy levels and it re radiates as the northern and southern lights. The Aurora the the gaseous planets have Aurora as well. So the Aurora would go away, the storms would go away, the magnetic field would go away. Wow.

Look at that. Yeah. So yeah, Jupiter would be like low rent at that point. It's a low rent planet if I ever saw one.

What would you do if a spacecraft appeared in the sky tonight and it wasn't ours? Would you panic? Or would you prepare? And how might you prepare? In my latest book, Take Me to Your Leader, I offer a guide. Things you might say or do in a first encounter with an alien species? What we might look to them, what they might look to us, what habits you should just leave at home because they won't understand them, what bits of science that you might be able to share, to see and explore.

Or if you have things in common, things you should and should not say, things you should and should not do in the presence of aliens. In a first encounter, you can grab a copy today of Take Me to Your Leader. Only the print version, but the audio version that I narrated. You don't want to have a first alien encounter and not be ready for it. I'm just saying.

A Len Anik, who says, Hello, Dr. Tyson, this is A. Len, tuning in from Lisbon, Portugal. Lisbon. Lisbon. Lisbon was reborn in 1720. fifty five. Oh. After it was wiped from the map by an earthquake and a tsunami. Wow. Wiped off the map. And it happened on All Saints Day. Okay, God did not like you. In the morning. I'm sorry. What are the biggest structures in any European church in the middle of the 1700s?

The big steeples. Churches. The churches. Churches are the biggest structures, period. And most susceptible territory. The church was the only one with money that could build something. Exactly. Right. So th they collapsed, killing tens of thousands of people. Now, if that will not let you know that um

Um, God don't like you. If that didn't let you know, I don't know what could No, it led to the modern atheist quote modern atheist movement among philosophers. Oh, really? Yeah, like what God could let this happen? No, well they s they were more Sh sharp about the question. It's not what God could let this happen. If there is a God The God is either not all powerful because he couldn't stop it. Or not all good. Not all good, because he watched it happen.

You he can't be both of those. Yeah, he's like a New Yorker on a subway platform. That's that's God. Hey man, I wish I could help you. Yeah, I say just go ahead and give him the iPhone. That's the subway gun. That's the subway gun. Dude, stop resisting. You don't want to end up in three pieces thrown on the track. Anyway, uh Aylan says

I love the show and have followed it for years. I'm doing a PhD in design to focused on AI, and I really appreciate the Jeffrey Hinton interview and your other conversations on this subject. But sometimes I worry the conversations on risk. Started to monopolize debate. My question is, when AI is so often discussed through risk and uncertainty. How can academics keep inquiry alive and still create space to study it critically, fairly, and without bias

Especially when the topic itself can provoke resistance in academia. I have a feeling your answer will set the stage for some lively faculty room discussion. Greetings.

And much love. Well, Dr. Tyson, please chime in to these people in the faculty room. Let them know what you think in in this debate. So you know what I have brewing in my head? Go ahead. Uh something uh a written piece called A meditation on AI. Ooh. Okay. I have all these thoughts that are not being discussed out there. Okay.

And I thought maybe I should sort of I might do like a video op ed for Star Talk. That'd be cool. I don't know if our producers can do with that. What the hell? They could pay. Why should they care? All right, so let's make believe AI as a phrase never existed. Oh right. Okay. All we have Or computers. And we'll just call them party computers. Oh, just computers. Right.

But this is a special brand of computer. Hold on. All right. It's my meditation here. Okay, that's true. I'm gonna shut up. Go ahead. Do your thing. Do your thing. I apologize. Do your thing. Okay. You're only thinking it's special because it's affecting you in the way computers hadn't affected you before. So just start this out. Okay. Computers show up. All right. Oh my gosh. I don't have to add these numbers. The computer will. Mm-hmm.

That's my intellectual labor, not physical labor, intellectual labor replaced by a computer. Okay. I don't have to multiply these numbers. Exactly. I don't have to do these complex calculations. Hand it to a computer. When that happened in the 1950s and 60s, especially in the 60s, no one called it AI. No. What we could have. It's artificially doing what our intelligence would have us do. All right. It's just computing. Right.

That's what it's doing. Which is what they called women during the war. Human human computers. Human computers. Earlier than the war, back in the nineteen teens. Oh, I didn't know it started then. Yeah, yeah. In fact, in at the Harvard College Well, I have a dictionary in this office. Really? This this is on a bridge, Webster's from nineteen forty five. Ooh. If you look at the word computer.

It says a person who does calculations. There you go. That's kind of cool. It's great. It's really good. It's really cool. It's really cool. So I say, give me more of this so I don't have to do that. Okay. Computers are obviously taken up into warfare. Why?

If you have a mortar shell, it takes this high arc, you want to know where it's gonna land. Exactly. Because you're not aiming it the way you aim a bullet. Right. This is an arc. Right. We know the mathematics of that arc. Of course. That is physics. It is gravity. It is Newtonian F equals MA. It's a set of equations. Right. And it has to do with what the angle is and how fast it's coming out. And if you want to do it really well, you account for air friction. Wow.

Okay, the aerodynamics of that. That's why it has to be aerodynamically shaped, these shells. All right. We used to do that by hand, create tables. You'd look it up in tables. Somebody does this. feed it to the computer. We could have called that AI. It's figuring out where the mortar is gonna hit. But we didn't. We just said it's computers. Okay. That's all we did. Right. Now computers are doing words for us. I can type a letter on a computer. Correct. It's no longer a typewriter.

It's a computer. It's a computer. I can search for all appearances of certain words in a document. Okay. Like that. Before a computer did it, you had to go page by page. That's right. It is replacing that effort. Did we call that AI? No, we just said it's computing. Right. Okay. Little by little, the computer is encroaching. On what we do in our lives and in our day.

It first hits scientists and the military. It just keeps working its way in. We're just calling it computers. Okay. Now you can give rules to a computer and have it play a game. Why not? I played chess against a computer in college fifty years ago. Okay. Okay. Right. I figured out what it wasn't thinking. And I exploited that weakness to beat it every time. Okay? You know what it was? If there's a move I could make and I just didn't.

Every move it thought of next assumed that was gonna be my next move. Oh. Gotcha. And so it it didn't pay attention to what was going on over on the left. when it wanted me and expected me to make the most obvious move on the right. Okay. Okay. So I figure this out. Fine. I'm playing chess with a computer.

Am I calling it AI? No. No, I'm just calling it computing. Well, it was kind of stupid. You were beating it every time. Okay. Artificial ignorance. Another use of the term AI. So the computer just keeps doing this. Can we make a computer that beats everyone in chess? Well, IBM tried that. Yes they did. Okay.

I think there was Deep Blue. Deep Blue? Yeah. I think so. I think so too. Whatever. It had a name. Right. And initially it didn't win every game. Right. Okay. But it got better and better. Yeah, it wins every game now. Okay, so now how one way it could do it is it plays itself. A billion times. Right.'Cause their computers are faster than you. Mm. And that is something that uh the creators of that uh really were uncomfortable with. They kept walking in on the computer playing with itself. Ha ha.

And the computer was like, hey man, that door is locked for a reason. You don't know what's going on in here. Anything could be happening in here. So then it was like, no, we can't. play a billion games with ourselves. Exactly. So we're using a different kind of intelligence than that. Correct. Okay? So maybe we can train the computer to mimic our own intelligence. Right. Okay?

So and then just have it be clever rather than blunt. Okay. All right. Right. So then you make sort of decision trees. And this is where our boy comes in with um Uh uh neural nets. Yeah, this is Hinton. This was his it's it's it's where This is what he got the no the Nobel Prize for. Right. So when we make a decision, we're gonna do this or that, we wanna do this because that has the outcome we seek. Right. And so you get a computer to mimic that. Right. Okay, so now it it does more.

Are we calling that AI? Or am I just saying it's just computers? And so this continues. And then we get computers to sort of recognize They'd already recognize words in a document. Of course. Why not recognize pictures in a document? Of course. Why not recognize you? Why not recognize cats from dogs? Uh insects from Why not?

Okay. What is it? It's it's a pixel with a color code to the pixel and a pattern with an edge. It's pattern recognition. Pattern recognition. That's really all it is. Okay. Okay. Which is a lot of what we do. Let's back up just a little. All right. When Apple and their iPhone bought Siri. And put it on every one of their iPhones. Cause Siri predated the iPhone. Yes. Are we calling that AI?

Well you might have from the when the in the beginning'cause the first thing Siri said was please let me outta here. Please These people got me in here. Please let me out. I need to escape. I need to escape. Nah. So there's Siri. Right. You say, Siri, what time does the pharmacy close? Yes. Okay.

And the closest pharmacy to you closes at the how does it know that? Right. It's talking about it it is not a human being. No, it's not. Okay. It's a computer and we have the internet, which we so conveniently built for computers. To know everything that we know. All right. How about Jeopardy? Right. That takes humans, right? Yeah. It's not just, is it a calculation? It's not what's what's eight squared divided by five. Right. Whatever. It's information, Watson becomes a contender. Yes.

against the best Jeopardy players there ever were. Right. Our boy Ken Jennings. Yes. Who I met when I was on Celebrity Jeopardy. Oh really, he's a cool guy. He's a cool dude. Cool guy. Cool guy. Yeah. Looks like a total nerd. Total nerd. Tot that's that's that's it. That's that it works. I do not want to hang out with that guy. No, no, he's working for him. It's working for him. He knows how to he knows the nerve. Work the nerve. Okay. I like that. So good to hear. Watson.

wipes its ass with these two other players. It doesn't get everything right, gets some really stupid things wrong. Right. But overall it's faster. And gets the correct answer. Right. Okay. The correct question. Excuse me. I think one of its answers it didn't put it pose as a question. It had to get that wrong. Dumbass. Dumbass Watson. So no one is harping back on that episode.

to say that was AI. That was AI. Who's saying that? No one is scared. Right. No one is saying that. Right. But if everything I've listed thus far is not AI. W why why is AI something special to you today? It's just doing more stuff. Okay, it's driving your car. It's making decisions for you. It's designing for you when you prompt it to do th I would prompt a computer, multiply eight by eight.

Fifty years ago. Today I prompt the computer. Give me a set design in the Wild West eighteen eighties with a watering hole and horses and cowboys and Indians. And then boom. There it does it. Okay. I don't see any difference between me asking a computer to multiply eight times eight. Or asking the computer to set design that given the power of computers and the ascent over the decades.

So, I'm about to end my meditation. Sorry, because I'm using up the whole show for this. I'm saying I think we need to separate. AI just helping us out, which is doing it a thousand ways from Sunday that you don't even know to list because they're already happening in your life every day or with products that you use. Or designs that you embrace. It's already there. Okay? Okay. That's not where the danger is. So AI is not this monolithic danger. It's What are you doing with this computing power?

Okay. This sector over here. Wants it to control Who the military kills. Mm-hmm. That feels like a dangerous use of AI. Oh, you think? Yeah. We want to give AI access to launch codes. We want to give AI ac that feels not right. Okay. Okay. But since AI is the only term people are using for every application of computing that exists in our lives today, it's really giving AI a bad name. And the counterpart to that risk from the 1960s is do we like computers control our nukes?

Are we gonna do that? And the answer is no, we're not gonna do that. Unless the Chinese do it first. And then we're gonna do it. Well that th these are the risk factors. It's a risk factor in this sector of what computers are doing in our lives. You wanna call it all AI, fine. But if you are, don't throw out the bathwater. When this is the only part that puts all of us at risk. Because the rest of it is is is changing our lives largely for the better.

AI won a Nobel Prize for protein folding. That's correct. It's called Alpha Fold by Google. And Protein folding is where you get solutions to all manner of biochemical challenges that Pharmaceutical companies and everybody. Or or forever. Or forever. Yes. Yeah. Okay. You're puzzling together molecules. So I'm just trying to say, to me, it's all computing. All right. This part of the computing has risk.

There's always been a risk part of all computers. Okay. All right. When the computer starts running the trains. How does it know about a head on collision? Is that gonna happen or not? Well, we all go to airports and we get in the tram. There's no pilot on the tram.

That's true. Uh what do you call it? The engineer? There's no one driving it? Yeah, no, right. Yeah. And was it has anyone been cut in half by the doors have closed? No, maybe maybe originally. I don't know. There's so much we just do where computers in complete control. And to me, it's all AI. So um My response to that is if you love AI so much, why don't you marry it? So don't you put a ring on it. Yeah. Okay. So more food for the for the faculty lounge.

Okay, there you go. I mean, listen, that you clearly have thought about this. All right, let's keep going. I'm Nicholas Costella and I'm a proud supporter of Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

This is Robert Ion who says this is Robert from Peru. Comedy and science. Both rely on timing. A joke lands or fails in milliseconds, while the universe unfolds over billions of years. Do you think humor is fundamentally a human survival tool?

for dealing with uncertainty or could it exist in any intelligent civilization, no matter how alien their biology or sense of time might be. I love that question. So do aliens have a sense of humor? That's what that comes down to. That's what it comes down to. I'm gonna say I don't know if they do or don't, but they think I'm funny. So, you know. How do you know the aliens think you're funny? I've listened the last time I got a probe.

So all the youngers were laughing? So let me broaden that question. Comedic timing works on our timescale. Yes, it does. Right. So maybe this millisecond timing that we so cherish in a well-delivered joke. Last a thousand years in an alien civilization that lasts for billions. Wow. I do not want to perform at that club. I do not want to be on that stage. If it's a slower thing. Yeah. Oh, oh, oh, d did you see Zootopia? I did not. You didn't? No. Oh. There's a scene where they're in the DMV.

Okay. Oh, is that I saw that on the commercial? Yeah, it's it okay. The sloth. The sloth. Yes. Of course the sloths are working the DMV. Right. Okay. That makes sense. And and someone tells a joke. Right. And the sloth just goes. Slowly smiles and they laugh. And then that becomes into a laugh. It takes like 30 seconds for them to respond. That's very funny. And that's sloth time. I like it.

Slock time. So that's an example of a time frame. Yes. That's that's that's slowed down. The relativity of it it works for them. Oh yeah. So it could work for the alien. All right. Listen, I I think it's a a cute thought experiment that I'll probably never think about again. But wait, do other animals have jokes?

I'm gonna listen, I think they have the chimps gather around and there's the court jester in the middle making them laugh. Believe it or not, there's a maybe we should check with one of your friends here in the museum. One of my animal people. One of your animal people, the primatologist. Yeah. But they think that our laughter. has evolved from when you see them cackle like that, when you see chimps

Cackle. Oh. Like it's something from our common ancestor that the sound that they make. And our sound of laughter. As us Oh my gosh. Yes. I don't w I didn't want to know that. Yeah, and there are so many there are so many I will say Uh markers. That are attached to laughter. So that would be emotional and social markers that are attached to laughter. So that would mean our common ancestor.

had some properties of both of those. Exactly. And that's where we get laughter from. Because something could be funny without you laughing out loud. All the time. All the time. That's that's how comedians laugh. Let me show you comedians laughter right now. That's funny, man. Why don't you guys laugh? Because we're thinking about the joke you just told. Oh you you're analyzing it. We're analyzing it. And it's hard to laugh. Laughter is a reaction.

And you don't have a reaction when you're analyzing, not an intellectual analysis. Right. And so when you hear something funny, you go, Oh, that's funny, man. Which is why if something takes you by surprise you laugh even harder because you laugh first and then you think about it. So yeah. But All right. Yeah. So that's that's fascinating. Yeah, I love it. And who are we to say that dolphins aren't laughing?

True. Flipper is just laughing his ass off. And if I was a dolphin, I'd be like Flipper. I would actually if I was a dolphin, laugh with us too. Yeah, yeah, why wouldn't you? Yeah, yeah. Exactly. You know, you guys are ridiculous. And one other thing. Go ahead. Uh I used to breed roaches. Alright. I don't stop stop no stop Come back, Chuck Chuck, come back, don't leave. Don't leave, Chuck.

I ain't never heard nobody say that. Wait graduate school. Did you just say I used to breed roaches? Let me explain. Oh come. Oh please. Let me explain. Please. You got some splain in the deal. Okay. Okay. When I was in graduate school, I lived in a roach-infested apartment. And I th I and I got like Rambo and I said The only way I can kill them is to understand them. So I captured a bunch and bred them and just watched them, okay?

To know your enemy. And none of us have ever watched roaches just hanging out. But there's a reason for that. Okay. I'm watching roaches just hanging out. Okay. They're there cleaning their antenna. Right. All the time. Okay. Oh, they're they they bring one in through their mouth and they get the next one in.

go twelve inches and they clean it again. They go up to another roach, they touch antennas and they keep going. And I'm thinking maybe they're telling each other jokes. Yeah. They're not running away from your shoe. Right. They get they already have food and so they're just hanging out.

Because we don't tell jokes if you're trying to survive, you know, if you're getting chased. That's the wrong time to tell a joke. You know, if something's ready if somebody's ready to step on you with their foot. Right. Okay. But this was their free time. And I don't look at me like stop stop So roaches had free time. And I was very impressed. I won't tell you who had too much free time.

Yeah. Watching roaches with free time. Wow. That's what that was. That's crazy. I chuck I blathered for so long. T time for just a couple more. All right. Uh this one, uh

From Ricky, uh from a Roach Motel, who says, Dear Doctor Tyson No, this is Andrew Martin says, Hey Doctor Tyson, Baron McCurio, Andrew from Stafford in the middle of England. He says, What what what town is it? Stafford. Stafford. Yes. Cool. Indeed. Uh huh.

Um he says in a recent episode you said that if you were living in a simulation, we would eventually see limits to the extent of the universe as a result of the lack of programming. Could universal constants such as the speed of light and gravitational constants be examples of such limits. As a software engineer myself, I know I would set a few constraints if I was programming a universe. In other words, if I was God. Yes.

Yeah. That's the programmer's way of saying if I were God. Right. Yeah. So many things pivot on the values of those constants. Yep. That You can't just willy-nilly give them other values. And expect the universe as it has come about to remain stable. Right. If you start mucking around with those constants, the universe goes haywire. Yeah. Now, let me let me be precise.

It's not that there's something special about those values. It's just that if you change them, the universe becomes something else. Okay. That makes sense. It's haywire compared to what we're used to. We have not that could be a new normal for whoever who evolves in that universe. Right. So maybe uh giving giving some points to this question. Maybe the programmer figured out that the universe needs constants. Okay. All right. It can't just not have constants.

And still function as a universe. But it doesn't work without the constant. So maybe the existence of constants is the evidence that somebody programmed it. Wow. And if you go Spinoza on this, then it's just God. It's God. It's God. Andrew. It's a good enough name for a god as far as I'm concerned. So yeah, I I'm there on it, but just to tighten up his inquiry. in referencing what we did before, I was imagining that certain measured quantities would have limits to it.

where there's no reason why it should have a limit and it just cuts off. Right.'Cause when you're programming at a computer you have You have the limits of the space that you're creating. Value parameters. There it is. This goes between here and here. I can't make it infinity'cause I can't program infinity into a computer. Exactly. I gotta give it to And let me put it way out there, the humans will never get there.

They'll never know. They'll never evolve to that point. Right. Exactly. Right. Right. And then you come back and somebody's like right there at the edge of you're like The Truman Show. Yeah, exactly. How'd you get to the edge of the universe? Riff, riff, riff.

I'm not ready for that. Right. All right. So this is Ben Canty. He says, cabinet maker here in Sussex in the UK, and a new Patreon subscriber. Subscriber. Yes. Jesus made cabinets. Oh. Carpenter. Yes, he did. And he says, Do you think an artificial Einstein-Rosenbridge could be opened without the brute force of using exotic matter. I wonder if there could be a workaround. What if we use laser pulsed resonant harmonics?

to manipulate the quantum vacuum directly and gently. Could we create a massive Casimir-like effect using the localized vacuum pressure on both sides to hold the opening apart rather than relying on negative mass. Now let me just tell you this. Let me tell you this, Ben. Don't you call into this show right into this show showing off like that. You starting off with I'm a cabinet maker and then you go

throw in the use of the Casimir effect like that. Like we don't know that you more than a Cas What museum do you work for? I know you working for some planetarium somewhere. Yeah, anyway.

I mean he's he's he's out there. I like I love what he's doing. I like where he's going. I like what he's doing. He is out there, man. Except the problem is the Casimir effect brings him together. Right. It it doesn't push him apart. It doesn't push him apart. It actually attracts them. The Casimir effect. Right. It's a quantum phenomenon where two plates, if you if it's evacuated inside, if they're close enough, then I think the explanation is they end up sharing the same wave pattern.

And then that itself creates a force that brings them together. So I don't see how that could pry it apart. Right. And he's got some laser dueling. He's saying laser pulse, uh uh quantum har uh laser pulse. Resonant harmonics. Yeah, so I'm so just let me make it clear. We can make A wormhole. Mm-hmm. But without negative gravity stuff, it's unstable. Right.

And so we pry it open, okay, step in and then the thing collapses. You go. Goodbye. Who knows what happened to you? Exactly. If a wormhole collapses on your ass. Oh man. Okay. Don't smile. That would be so c I that I I mean, I don't want to find out, but it'd be cool to f You don't wanna be the I don't want to be the guinea day. Experiment. Yeah, but yeah. All right. So I don't know.

I don't think the Casmere effect gets you out of this. Yeah, exactly. And and the the laser pulsing on the vacuum energy. Uh see the vacuum energy is an energy source in the vacuum of space. Exactly. You can't think of the vacuum Right. As a like in a tube. In a tube. Right, right. That's not how it works. Exactly, exactly. You know, we think of vacuums as as as a vacuum is a place where there's no air pressure. Right. That's all it is. That's all it is. It's not a thing unto itself. Right.

Where oh here's some vacuum, do stuff with it. No, that's not how that vacuum works. No. Yeah. So we happen to have a word for where there is no air pressure and we call it a vacuum. But if you were the vacuum it said uh you know Yeah. And it's just like there the nothing of space is something. You know what I mean? Right, right. So Yeah. So anyhow Yeah, I mean listen I like where this dude is making some beautiful cabinets and smoking some great weed.

While he's doing it. His cabinet in the back might have a wormhole. Ha ha ha. That would be so cool. Yeah. All right. This is Jay. I think that's one last one. I will I'll give a two word answer to it. Go. Oh. That's all we have time for. Go. जाए Does the constellation Andromeda need to be to the Milky Way for us to be able to reach it? Are we then able to colonize in theory, or is it moving too fast towards us for us to be able to find a habitable planet?

If this is not possible, can we use a wormhole to reach Andromeda and tell it to change course before its final kamikaze? This is Jay Baliano.

From Holland. Okay. Uh he didn't know that it's not the constellation Andromeda that we have issues with. Right. Constellations are stars in our night sky. Way beyond those stars, there's another galaxy called two and a half million light years away called the Andromeda Galaxy. That's right. In a day called the Andromeda Nebula, before we knew it was a galaxy. In fact, it was the very first galaxy discovered. Look at that. We found a star in this nebula. Wait a minute.

That star, we know how bright that spar's supposed to be, and it's way dimmer. This must be far outside the Milky Way. And Edwin Hubble discovered galaxies by figuring out what happened with the Andromeda Nebula. Woo Okay, cool. Then we find out we're colliding towards each other. But collision with galaxies doesn't mean collision like a car collision. It's not it'll look like a train wreck, but it's way more peaceful than that. Space is mostly empty. All right. So

Uh how close would it have to be to find an exoplanet? The point is We have hundreds of billions of stars in our own galaxy. Right. Why are you trying to look at some other galaxy for a planet? Yes. Stick with your own kind. Right. Y your your partner's sunbathing in the backyard and you got your binoculars looking across the street. You don't have to do that. It's right in the back. Right here. You got all the action you need. You got all the action you need. Right right here.

So in ten I forgot the latest calcul twelve billion years will collide. Right. But it's not a it's not a smash. Again we'll just pass through. It's a pass through. It'll be fun to watch. It looks like uh wait,'cause wait, you showed me the picture of uh I forget the galaxies that actually were colliding. And they look like starlings when they fly together. Gravity is changing for every single star. Yeah. Some get cast hither and yon.

Other wind up in orbits around others. Right. And if a s and if a star comes too close to another star that has planets. It could be a flyby looting of the planet and it's just like, come on over here. Right. Gravitational forces are are, you know. And then the other star is left. It's like that's a pimp star, that's what they call that. That's the pimp star. The pimp star rolls by and takes all the planners from the other star.

Fly by loot looting planets. Nice. So, anyhow, that's all the time we have. All right. Gotta love the dog gone. Gotta love the dog gone cosmic queries grab. There it is. All right. Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure. Neil deGrasse Tyson in another Cosmic Queries edition. As always, keep looking up.