Our Burning Questions – Simulation Debate

Gary, am I supposed to be some waitment that'll

sue the burning sensations they feel? Oh, I think you should be, yes. Twice a day. Call me in the morning. Coming up, StarTalk's special edition.

Welcome to StarTalk.

“You're a place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.”

StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk's special edition. You'll be gratifying here. You're a personal astrophysicist. Special edition means I got Gary O'Reilly right here.

How you doing Gary?

I'm good, thank you, Neil.

Yes, recently an official American citizen congratulations. Yeah, and which recently been watching the Winter Olympics. And I'm pleased to say I enjoy being an American citizen because we win way more gold than the Brits. That's, yeah, we also have multiples of the population and the resources.

But yeah, okay, yeah. And Chuck, I got you here, how you doing, man? Always great, man. Feeling good. Very nice, very nice.

“So, you know, this is one of those episodes where I get to hear these”

murmurs from you and the producers that you guys have questions as well. Yes. Like burning questions. And even though you didn't pay the Patreon fee to gain access to my answers, you sneak in ahead of the line.

Yeah. Could you be a little more, you know, I liked the fact that Gary just owns it. He was like, yeah, you know, he's like when the bouts are lifts up the rope for you at the club, you don't question that.

Yeah, it's just walking. So, what you have, Gary? Well, like I say, our production team and our associates have their burning questions and we tried to burn through them the back end of 2025, but we've got nowhere near, completing them. So, we've got to pick it up, so it's burning questions take two.

Bring it on. All right, here we go. Here's one. Maybe it's an unknown answer. But how about this? I was watching a truck the other day. Well, who's this from? Who's asking this? This is me. This is me.

Oh, I was watching you. Yes, a Gary or Riley question. Yeah, I have pushed to the front of the line. I've just ignored the boutser. And what's happened is a truck has passed me on the road.

And I'm thinking, wow, that really looks like it's heavy. And it's loaded up with dirt. And then the thought pops into my head, how heavy is pound it earth? Is that something that's unavailable? Yes, it is. Yeah. Cool, and then.

Okay, earth is weightless. Oh, thank you. There you go. Okay. So, just the same way, astronauts, being the space station who are orbiting earth are weightless. Earth orbiting the sun is weightless. Oh, that makes perfect sense because the astronauts

are falling around the earth. We are falling around the sun. Yeah, the sun. So, earth is weightless.

“Oh, maybe that's what the answer you're wondering, but.”

Oh, nobody, you know what? It's the answer. It's the answer of the most people. Myself included didn't quite see coming. Yeah, you didn't see that coming. You didn't see that coming. I love that answer because that's the case.

However, let's say that we fall into another planet. What scale? Well, what will we be on the scale? Oh, that's different. That's it's force of attraction on you. You, right. Okay. And yes, you can weigh the earth that way. You can weigh a planet that way by asking it how much you weigh on that planet.

But you, you're asking about the truck, Gary. Right. And there's a, there's a clever way to get the

weight of something that has tires, if I may. Okay. Here's what you do.

Look on the side of the, on the side wall and look at what air pressure, those tires are under. Okay. Generally, the bigger the wheel, the lower the air pressure, I don't know for sure what truck tires are. They might be 30 pounds per square inch, something like that. Heavy cars are like 60 pounds per square inch. Your bicycle, if it's like a racing bike, it's 90 pounds per square inch. Right. So large tires tend to have lower per square inch,

but let me just pick a number and let me say it's, let's just say 50. All right. Let's just say 50. That's a good round number. It's just a nice round number. 50 PSI. 50 PSI. Then here's what you do. Walk up to the truck, not while it's on the road passing you. And get a tape measure.

you know, because it's round and then it flattens a little and that flattening will have an

area. Okay. It'll be like maybe five inches by six inches, let's say, whatever. And you multiply those

“per tire. So let's say five inches by six inches, how many square inches is that?”

30. 30. And these full-size trucks have 18 wheels. We know that quiz there. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So 30 times 18 is, let's just use round numbers here. Let's call it 20. So 30 times 20. Five hundred. Five hundred. Six hundred. Six hundred. Okay. Six hundred. So there's six hundred. We're round very round to here. Six hundred square inches of

tire in contact with the road. If it's 50 pounds per square inch,

multiply the 50 times the 600. And what do you get? 30 grand. 50 times 600 is 30,000 pounds. That would be 15 tons. That's a 15-ton truck right there. Wow. Now, or, or you know, it's written on the side of a little style. A little teeny triangle. You can read it on the side of the truck. Right. But on the side of the

“truck is it's maximum. Yeah. Gross weight. Oh, I got it. So that's okay. That's how much it's”

allowed to be. It doesn't mean that it's actually that weight at that time at that time. And the 15 tons would not only be the truck, but also. So truck to unit. The cab. The tractor unit. Yeah,

the cab. Right. So that's because you did it for all tires. Right. Exactly. Yeah. But yeah,

that's what you're saying because the tire itself, the more weight it has, the more surface it will take up. Correct. And because of the change in that surface, that is how you can calculate the weight based on whatever is in it doesn't make a difference because you're going by that area. Correct. And the old trick that any trucker knows is that if there's an overpass and you're like an inch too tall for the overpass, you let air out of the tires. That's it. And watch what happens.

You let air out. What happens to each surface area? It gets wider and it's wider. And you let air out. So you've reduced. So you've made the surface area greater and the air pressure lower. Right. So that when they multiply together, you still get the correct way to the truck.

“It'll be correct every time. Okay. That's cool. Right. Yeah. That's how you do that, Gary.”

So next time you're on a cross country trucking trek, Gary, bring your type measure with you. Or read the side of the freaking truck. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. We're going to do Alex. This is our boy, Alex. I wonder which Alex it doesn't say which Alex is. We have two Alex. Oh, it's Alex P. It's Alex P. Alex P. Yes. Yes. This is from Alex P. Our producer. And he says, Google's new quantum chip can in five minutes complete computations that would take

modern supercomputers longer than the age of the universe. Some view this as evidence of us living in a multiverse. What other proofs might submit the multiverse theory in your view? Yeah. I don't think let me restate what he's trying to say there. If we have that power, that means we have the power to create a whole very convincing universe within our computers. And you can create like Mario, you know, the Mario universe where Mario has free will and is thinking

complex thoughts rather than just trying to collect coins. And so I think that's where he's coming at. It means we have risen to the power of a civilization that can simulate other civilizations. Right. And maybe we have been created with the power to then reach that level as well, possibly implying that we are creating a living in a simulation. Yeah. And so we briefly hinted at this in an earlier recording, but it's worth repeating, that when you, I don't think we've ever programmed the computer,

but when you do, up at the top, you have all these parameters, okay? What's the value of pie? What is the, you know, what is the gravitational constant? What are the, and these are your variables that get preset right at the top? And then you just call them in any of your sub routines

but you have to set up something there, okay? So how many digits of pie am I going to hand the

“computer for when I calculate with pie? When I programmed it, six digits was good enough,”

but if I want to feel luxurious, I'll give it 12, but pie keeps going, okay? Now suppose you measure something in the universe, and it's only accurate to 12 digits of pie, and you make more measurements, and it's getting the wrong numbers for pie. That would be evidence that you have reached the programmer's limit of what they established for your world, and that's like in the Truman Show, where he paddles his robot to the end, and hits the wall, and hits the wall, and hits the wall,

and the, is a painted wall. And so the, this example's version of the painted wall is the limits

of certain physical constants, or other phenomena that have unnatural limits that you encounter. And another one was, we have cosmic rays are formed by high energy phenomena in the universe. We see them, they arrive here on earth, and they come from halfway across the universe. You can measure how many cosmic rays have a given energy, okay? So there's a lot that have this energy, and you go to higher energy, there's fewer and fewer, okay? All right, let me just follow me here.

You go to higher and higher, there's fewer and fewer. Suppose you get to a point where there's a cutoff, and it doesn't sort of blend into nothingness. That could be the upper energy limit of the

programmer. They're saying, they'll never get there. Let me just put this well beyond. And in fact,

we've been humans for at least 100,000 years in our current form several 100,000 years. So maybe the programmer had no expectations we ever come near that. Right, yet we did. I see walk away from the program, or if they walked away from the program and came back like, oh shit, oh my gosh. Hey Jim, come over here, look at this Jim. Justin, they've gone nuclear on us, man. They walked away to get us sandwiched, and we were, we had just discovered fire. We're like,

if they went to lunch and they came back and like, oh god, what's up? Right, because a, you know, a thousand years until us could be a day onto the program, however that biblical phrase goes. Right. So it could be that we start finding the limits in the universe, the measurable limits, and that would be a way to show that there's a programmer out there. Yeah. Do you expect it to be infinite and just have no limits and just keep going on?

No, no, no, no. So I guess what I'm saying is, in a software, you can't just put infinity

“in it, because it has to hold it and then calculate with it. So you have to truncated in some”

arbitrary place that you think is sufficient. So when I went to 12 decimal places on the value of pi in my programming, so I've written in my life about 50,000 lines of code plus or minus. And in there, you know, you've got your favorite variables you put in. I went to 12 decimal places, because that's more accurate than anything we've ever needed to calculate out to the radius of the universe. So I'm good for anything I needed there. Right. So with my software, I was not likely to hit

the limits of creation, but it's a, it's a way to think about it for sure. Absolutely. I mean, we've discussed this on a number of occasions. We need to be thinking differently to solve problems that have so far stumped us. Not only that, we need to be thinking differently to even know what questions to ask. Exactly. That we didn't even, we're not even aware, we're visible to us in plain sight, because our brain wasn't ready to even think that way. I lose sleep over there.

Hello. I'm thank you, Broke Allen, and I support Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil D. Grass Tyson.

“What's he's burning questions? I think he's in wait. Yeah. I wonder which one you're thinking of.”

Okay, let me, let me say it for the way. So best of storm would say, you have a burning question

hate sliced alone even more than I do. I'm the ointment for your burning question. Right. This is

from Brian, he's a community manager. Oh, Brian, Brian. Yeah, he looks after our fan base, basically.

Our Patreon membership, some things, so this is cool. Okay, with Brian, have to say. All right. How does the debate shift when comparing AI that only imitates life to computational systems built

“from living neurons or biological substrates that make actually experience something?”

What a question. The question was, how does that debate play out? Yeah. How does it debate shift when comparing AI that only imitates life to computational systems built from living neurons or biological

substrates that make actually experience something? Yeah. Well, that's a wild question, but yeah,

maybe maybe I want to give a cop out answer here. Okay. Maybe the distinction is artificial between those two. Maybe if something can calculate and can do things you need it to do and it's way smarter than you and it can answer all your questions because as the sum of the world's knowledge of all humans and then you have another entity that can think up questions as well and respond to you, like does it really matter what it's made of? Who cares? What do you want to

measure, maybe philosophically, for sure, but in practice, this is the whole point of the touring machine,

the touring machine, which came out of his research paper called the imitation game, which and the title of that paper became the title of the movie, okay, that that starred Benedict Cabbage Patch and Keira Knightley. I love Benedict Cabbage Patch. That's going to be a match. That's going to be sober now. Let me say something. He will be forever now Benedict Cabbage Patch from now on.

“That's how I got to remember up at the same time. So brilliantly acted and the whole movie”

of an important slice of history there. Point is, in that research paper, he hypothesized he suggested that a computer is functionally conscious. If you can interact with it, and do not know whether it's a computer or a human being on the other side of that conversation. So then the race was on. How do we get to do that? We need a computer that understands language. We need a computer that knows what verbs and nouns and adjectives are that can compose a sentence.

We need a computer that can interpret what you said enough to then speak back with you. So when I was in college, I interacted with an early version of this, and this was a, it was an interactive

“computer that took some cues from psychologists, okay? So you would say, dear computer, I'm not”

feeling too well lately. Tell me about why you think you're not feeling well. Okay? Well, I'm having problems at home. Tell me about your mother and your relationship. So it knew enough to put words in a place and just come back to you the way a seemingly concerned psychologist would. And this got to a point where you did not know if it was a computer or just a concern psychologist viewing a conversation with. And this, as far as I was concerned, fully satisfied

this invitation game. And therefore, I did not know if that was a person or a computer. There's an early New Yorker comic that has a dog at a console and there's a room of dogs on consoles. And one dog says to the other, this is early internet. So this is like late nineties, something like that. The good thing about the internet is no one knows that you're a dog. That's right, right, right. And so who cares if it's biological or neuro, neurochemical,

a neuro electronic? I don't think it matters. All that matters is the, in the end, is the behavior that you're interacting with. So what about what about self-awareness? Because that becomes, I mean, we don't, so what you just described the consciousness is no longer functional

questions. We ask questions irrespective of whether we are being engaged or not. We have questions

“of ourselves. We ask questions of the universe. We never stop asking questions. And we never stop”

having that conversation with ourselves. So that self-awareness is what we would say is a integral part of our consciousness. So what about that? All right, so the self-awareness, if that only manifests to others, if they interact with you, then who cares? Whatever's going on in your head

will never matter to me or anyone else in the world unless we interact or unless we interact

with decisions you made in your own head because of your thoughts. And so one of Isaac Azimov's three laws of robotics. Okay. I forgive me if I can't recite them in order precisely. One of them is no matter what you will not harm human being. Yes, human being. That's the first law of rehearsal. The second law is you will not allow harm to within your power. You will not allow harm to occur to a human being. Right. So you will prevent it if you can.

Third one is you will protect your own existence provided it does not conflict with law one or two. Right. Okay. So yourself preservation is contenting upon the protection of human beings as well. In those three laws. So here you are thinking to yourself, I want to do this. I want to do that. I want to harm someone else. I will react when I see that engage. But I'm not going to respond to your pure thoughts. There's a whole twilight zone episode on that where this guy was flipping

a coin and it landed on its edge and at that moment he heard everyone's thoughts and you know he walked into a bank and there's a bank guard. Banks used to have guards. There's a bank guard and he heard the bank guard saying when the bank closes, I'll take the keys and I'll steal the money from the vault and I'll do that tonight. So the guys freaking out he's calling the police on the bank guard and then he learns that the bank guard just has these policies every day every day every

day. That's all we have thoughts. Right. And so if he never acts on them, doesn't matter to anybody

else. It's your own little world. So if I'm a computer and you're not talking to me and I'm not having any thoughts, what do you care? You want to go in and say what is conscious in the other isn't when everyone's interaction with them is no different. So I'm not philosophically

“I agree. It makes a difference. In practice, I think it doesn't. That's my point. And the”

robots are going to want to protect itself. You can program into it that it wants to protect itself. Right. There it is. So yeah. And so I see what you're saying. Like if I programmed into you compassion and that by doing so, I pretty much anticipate all the scenarios where compassion should be shown or I just make it a default setting where you show compassion even before you do anything else which is kind of an understanding and acknowledgement and you know. Right. There be Jesus.

You don't make Jesus right there. I am Jesus, but bless you, my son. Everybody has to build in these guardrails. Everybody has to be the good act to not the bad actor. And I don't think any of us in this conversation right now believe that

that is always going to happen. Don't always be a bad actor. Oh and yeah. But Gary, that's true for

humans. That'll also be true for robots. Thank you. It's gotta for robotic humans. If I program the robot like Chuck said one variant is hugely compassionate and another doesn't have the guardrails that robot is going to do harm just the way humans do harm. Right. And what do we do? We rest

“them, try them, put them in jail. So again, I think it's artificial to distinguish what you're”

made of versus how you actually get interact with and I'm going back to the tearing test. Okay. The one thing I would say about the sort of artificial if you want silicon intelligence as opposed to a biological intelligence is the biological intelligence is generally a low energy intelligence whereas the other is a high energy consumer. No. So the high energy one, you're talking about all of the AI farms where they're high energy consumption. Yeah. What's happening

there is they are mining the whole internet of all of its information. It is having way better access to knowledge than you do. Right. Do with your own loans themselves. So if the human mind

about a question than an average human does, I bet it's not using much energy either. Right.

Okay. All right. Let's see the point you make. You're just betting that. And that's when we'll start elect the public office. Oh. Yeah. When they start using as much energy to think as we do. Is that another is that a guardrail anyone's considered right now? Well, the AI could not be or should be elected to an office. Yeah. I think because AI can be programmed to be completely rational. In my experience, no one likes rational leaders because they don't, they're

not as susceptible to emotional appeals. Right. And I'm not saying I want it that way. I'm saying this is my read of how people behave. It's like in courts, they want to bring in a jury that can be emotionally swayed by arguments from a lawyer, not because the arguments are so logical, but because the arguments have emotional and passionate towards the goal of the lawyers themselves. So it seems to me politicians need to be people who know how to listen to you and

“can internalize your feelings. That's how you get to vote for them. What you could do is”

have an elected official who has this emotional connection, but this should be at least one member of their cabinet that's a completely logical bot. Now that's kind of cool and a visor. It's a bot logical advisor. So you say, I want to do this that and the other and you go up and say, what do you think of that? And it says that is a wonderful idea. However, you will be voted out in the very next time. Or that's a wonderful idea. You've already hit your turn limits,

go ahead and do it. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Do you got another one? Sure thing. This is Peter from Legal, our business affairs. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Peter says, there's an old saying,

the best time to plan a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today with an eye to that.

Yeah. It's a pretty cool thing. Unless the trees, life expectancy is less than 20 years. Oh, okay. He says, with an eye toward a much needed future thinking effort that could begin today, if you were able to snap your fingers and make it so, what one thing would you change about the way children and young people are educated in the US and even worldwide. In other words,

“where have we gone wrong in our approach to education and what would you do to correct that?”

Wow. Okay. So, I have a lot of folks on this and one day I'm going to write a book, an education book, not you. It's still, it's still percolating still. Yeah. I have a lot of ideas on this. But let me, let me distill it down to just a couple of key points. One, we need to train people not what to know, so much as how to think. Yes. How to see information and analyze it. Yes. Because with value, what to know, you either know what are you're don't.

Do you know it? And you perform well on jeopardy, but real solutions in this world come less from what you know and more than from what you can figure out when confronted with a problem that is yet to have been solved. All right. So, in the workplace here's an example, a little contrite, but it's an example. You hand a task to someone. In a work plan, I'm a manager and I hand a task and the to extreme responses. One of them is, this was not in my job description. I don't know,

this is, no. Okay. That's one. All right. The other one is, wow, I've never seen this before.

Give it to me. I will see what I can do with it. These are two completely different pathways of employees and a workplace. One of them will classify in place. The other will continue to ascend. Do you see a new problem as something that someone else should solve because you're not trained

“or a new problem as something that you will gladly take on because you like solving the unknown?”

School should be taught as something where you solve problems more than as a place we just loaded with information. So that's my first point. Say, amen to that. We need to have schools where at the end of the day you are sad that the school day has ended. Yeah. Think about that.

up at the clock can't wait for the buzzer to ring. At the end of the day, you can't wait for the

“date at Friday. You can't wait till the weekend begins. At the end of a holiday before the summer,”

even graduation day that you say, "You're now graduates and you toss your hat in the air and you're celebrating that you don't have to continue to learn when that was your only job." Right. What's to learn? And I'm not going to blame you. Of course, we have the rock anthem celebrating this. School is out for summer to get to school, to get to school. I'm not blaming students for this. I'm blaming the school because what's going on in the school

where students can't wait to get out. And when on the school was a celebration of learning,

where your curiosity is fed every day. No one would want to leave school. You would want to

“stay in there and continue to be enlightened for every waking moment. A, B, it also means when you graduate,”

you graduate to a life of continued curiosity, a life of continued learning. And right now, you have people getting out of high school. Let's say you're not, you don't go to college, you get out of high school, you get a job, you say, "I've done with school, school's been." And now you just, you have just ossified in place because you are done learning. You don't

buy any books. You don't keep, you're getting a curiosity beyond just your job's task.

You want to be good at your job, of course. But there's the rest of the world that keeps moving. Because you are trained what to know, not how to think and how to be curious. So you've got to change that as well. Last thing, I've come to learn that in a free society, you cannot legislate behavior in a progressive direction unless doing so can benefit you financially. Okay? So, oh, you don't want to integrate the lunch counter at warrants. We're not going to go to

warrants. Okay? That affects your bottom line. In order to make the change, I could not have convinced you just by conversation, I had to hit your pocketbook. And I hit your pocketbook. Oh, the lunch counters are now open or now integrated. Back as they needed to be in the 1950s and early 60s at FW Woolworth lunch counters. They each

“had a lunch in that within the buying force of the store. So, and that's why they are all out of business.”

No, because they integrated, they had DEI. DeI lunch counters. All right, Neil. Let's step up. Well, almost done. Okay. So, consider when whaling was a big business. Okay? We're going back into the early 1800s, let's say. All right. Whaling. Why did we hunt whales? Because they had it common. That's why. It's your big ass out of my ocean. Take it up on this ocean space for yourself. We were harvesting blubber. And we were

blubber. Yeah. Exactly. The blubber that keeps the whales warm. Yeah. Insulates them. Yeah. Because whales are warm-blooded was a fuel source. It's a great oil. Cleo for our lamps. Everything. Everything. Clean. It's whale blubber. Big, beautiful, clean whale blubber. Burn, baby, burn. The whale blubber. Exactly. So, you could have, you could have started

a movement back then, as some did, to save the whales. These big, beautiful creatures. And we're just slaughtering them for their fat. I mean, come on now. That didn't work until what happened. I'll turn it into fuel source. We discovered oil and baby that was safer and cheaper to process and use. Then the whole industry shifted. All right. And so, I'm not going to expect you to just say to people in a free country that they need to behave in a progressive or

green way. So, I would tell the people getting back to the question. I would tell people in the pipeline, in the educational pipeline, be inventive, economically inventive about how you can create

economic. Because when you make an economic solution or something, it flies. Because everybody wants

a piece of that. And that's just being practical here. Let me then throw in the chat box. Because I can get the chat box to do my homework. I can get the chat box to write a paper. So, are we going to see students not necessarily being in higher education in a bricks and mortar campus? They've got

“their chat box. And they do their learning there. Or is that taking the amount of the knowledge?”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, here's the problem. Here's the problem. Okay. So, let's go back to when, because I'm old enough to remember when the four function calculator dropped in price

from $200 to $30. Okay. That's relatively quickly. Mm-hmm. Like within like a year and a

half or two years. Over that time, the big question was, should we allow calculators in the classroom? And the answer was yes. Because there's some things you're learning that we're not as important as other things. And some of them is just drudgery work. Okay. Like long division. Yep. Does anyone know how to do long division anymore? Like, when are you going to be somewhere where

“you need to do long division? And you won't have access to a calculator. That's not going to,”

you're not going to be in caveman and you've got to start a fire. Well, I need long division

and no one taught me. That fire didn't start because you didn't carry the two.

The hell is your dumb ass problem? Now, we're all going to face the death. Because it didn't carry the two. So there's a place for that. And before calculators, we had slide rules. Yes. Slide rules cheating? No. It was just another way to get to an answer, but you had to know your steps to get to the answer because garbage in equals garbage out. So here's the problem with the chat box, chat GPT, etc. It is revealing to us that the school system values grades

“more than students value learning. And as long as that is true,”

everyone at all times will cheat on all exams to get a grade. But if the system instead were who is learning, nobody would use the chat box. Only just to help themselves to learn more rather than to as a substitute for their own ability to write or to know because they, themselves, would want to learn. Because the curiosity would be built in. And so until the day that happens, then teachers need to give oral exams. So we need a higher student to teach

your ratio to make that happen. I grew up in public school, 32, 34 kids per class, private schools are what between 10 and 15. 15 to get up. Yeah, yeah, tops. So that's the kind of ratio you need to give everyone an oral exam. And they get a, and they get two teachers assistance by the way. Right, right, right, right, right. It's like you have the teacher and then you have like Miss Betty and you have, you know, Miss Judy that helped the teacher. And there's only 13 kids in the

damn class. So those are my three bits of advice there. Okay. For when you include my comment about using AI to do your turn paper. I say, if you really want to learn Chinese and careful, what you go, learn Chinese and get ready to work for. Because just stay and I time for only a couple more questions. So what you got now. This is Frank's burning question. And he says, sounds French. He's our editor, Frank. Yeah. And, and, uh, Frank says,

help me. I am on fire. Do you know if he smokes cigarettes? I don't know if he smokes. He better. Otherwise your imitations don't work. That's right. Okay, he says, hey, Frank here. I might be editing this video right now. Oh, it looks to me like this office is a vault to the universe talking about your office. Could you grab your very favorite item and describe it to us. ASMR style. Wow. Look at that. Oh, but there's so many. I mean,

there's so much crap in your office. Oh my gosh. Jesus Christ. I swear to God, it looks like

all my stuff junk. Wow. That's not junk. That's for sure. But I mean, some of it is junk.

But it all has, it all has sentimental and personal value. Some of it has actual monetary value too. Some of it is, I don't want to put it out there, but some of that stuff from there don't, thank God, there's security because, you know, some of the stuff is, it's something simple. Let's keep it simple. Okay. Okay. Okay. Oh, ASMR style. So many years ago,

the planetary society caught notice of me. They co-founded by Carl Sagan and have a mission to

promote the public's understanding and appreciation of space exploration, especially that of the planets. I was invited to join the board of the planetary society. That's when I met Bill Nye. He was a member of the board. That's where I met. And Julian and is the widow of Carl Sagan who founded the planetary society. Well, after a couple of years of that, the idea came up. Should and Julian, who owns the rights to cosmos, resurrect the series? She mentioned it. I said, I'd be delighted

“to help. I bought modern insights to get a next verse. She said, have you thought about being host?”

And I said, no, I don't want to be a TV star. But you may be able to do this uniquely in the memory of Carl. So I said, okay. So I agreed to do cosmos. Then who was going to fund it? We went to PBS. And they said, we want to put in our own writers. And we said, no, we got writers. No. And so it didn't land on PBS. No, it didn't. Then Seth MacFarlane took interest in this. Because he's a science geek. You will note, if you watch any episode of the family guy,

he's had like the whole cast of Star Trek. And he's got time machines and weather machines and oh, okay. So Seth MacFarlane says, why not take it to Fox, to Fox. And we took it to Fox and Fox

“said, we'll bank roll the whole thing. And we said, okay, we're kind of control. Are you asking for?”

And they said, we don't really know how to make documentaries. So just do whatever you want to do. It was like, oh my god. So while that's happening, Fox acquires National Geographic. This gives Fox a world distribution for cosmos to show up on TVs in 40 other countries in ways that would not have happened. Had it just been Fox or definitely had it only been PBS. So I create a relationship with National Geographic. Then cosmos ends. And National Geographic says,

then heels, there anything else we could do together. And I said, well, I got this podcast called StarTalk. And they said, let's put that on TV. And I said, whoa, we like a talk show on TV.

You said, yeah. So we put StarTalk as the very first late night television science based talk show.

And it was nominated for it. Emmy four times four times. Now why am I saying all this? Because right

“here, in my hand, is a StarTalk mug created by National Geographic. It's a huge beer mug. I think”

it holds a pint. It's a beer mug that has StarTalk on it and National Geographic that could have only come about because it went to Fox after Fox acquired National Geographic, which could have only come about because Seth McFarland's work for Fox, which could have only come about because I became host the cosmos because I was on the board of the planetary society. That is this

pint. That's what you guys do in the UK, right? So right. Yeah. Might even be called a tankard.

So this stairs it me on the shelf. Every day packed with decades of memories that are the origin of its existence. There it is. Like I told you, Frank, some of this stuff is junk. So what's that? I guess we're not burning questions. How can we wait McFarland? Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. Dr. Tyson, how do you personally position yourself in relation to who's this from? Sorry, this is from Zhao. One of our editors. How do you personally position yourself

“in relation to religion? Would you describe yourself as an atheist or agnostic or something else?”

Depending on that position, how do you approach the question of death? Even if one is not religious,

do you consider it possible that something metaphysical might exist beyond the physical universe, or does science suggest that death is simply the cessation of existence? What happens to the complex thoughts, memories and emotions of person developed through their life, throughout their life? I asked this from the perspective of someone who was strongly atheistic and scientifically minded, now facing an incurable illness, my father is suffering and trying to convince myself that perhaps

there is something beyond. In light of this situation, how would you approach the question yourself

or what would be the best intellectually honest way to even consider from a scientific standpoint the possibility that something metaphysical might exist? That's a long question, but I think it's an interesting one. Yeah, well Zhao, thanks for bringing us down. I know, it's got down, Zhao. Okay, couple of things. Yeah, I recently learned that Stephen Colbert, who is himself religious, he's a developed Catholic. Yes, about Catholic. Yeah, yeah, that he calls people who say that

“they're agnostic as having no balls. If an atheist without balls, okay? That's how I would say,”

there's an atheist without gonads because they're not they're afraid to commit one way or another. I disagree with that. I think a lot of it nostic people did believe in God and then realize there's not a lot there to hold on to, but they still want to hold on to it. He just wants you to commit. Yeah, he wants you to go one way or the other. So I'm a different kind of agnostic based on what I've seen in what I've read. I call myself an agnostic only because

the definitions of words are how people use them. Unlike what we normally think of as a dictionary,

“defining a word, a dictionary describes a word as it has come into use. Okay? So if you look at”

leading atheists of the day, Richard Dawkins, who's been on the show several times, you look at Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens now deceased. These are leading atheists who each had atheistic books that they've written. Right. And you look at their behavior. There's a lot of their behavior that does not overlap with my behavior. For example, I will defend the use of ADNBC in reckoning years for BC's before Christ and ADIS anodominy, Latin in the year of our Lord.

I will defend the use of that because the Catholic Church put the Jesuit priest on the case to figure out how to fix the calendar that was broken. And it out of that came to the Gregorian calendar, which all the civilized world uses. So I get props to where it's due, whereas ardent atheists strip that from the calendar reckoning and use CE common error and BC before the common error. Who are they fooling? This is a cleansing of the communication

Broadway musical is Jesus Christ Superstar. My single favorite Cornelwork is Box Mass in B minor

“with handles and a sire a distant second, but it's still second. Okay? How dare you?”

How does the sire is actually written in English? Yes, and after the, yeah, uh, was at the King James Bible, but it was anyhow, I am not ardent against people who have strong or even mild religious faith. Not up in their face debating them this, whereas all these other folks I just listed have debated

to vote religious people in their lives. That's not me. Therefore, I don't want to say I'm an atheist

if by saying so you think I'm going to be like that. I need some other word that's softer than that because I personally am softer than that. And my best evidence for this was I had a friend of mine go up on the Space Shuttle. And on my Facebook page, I said, Godspeed, my friend's name and STS, I forgot which, you know, STS is how they numbered the Space Shuttle missions. And I said, Godspeed, Space Shuttle. People in the comment thread said, Godspeed, I thought you were an atheist.

Complaining that I used that word. How dare you use that? Exactly.

These were atheists trying to claim me. You have a blasphemed. You're no one. You blasphemed nothing. This is so frustrating. You have a tech of no idea. So, so that was very telling to me that there's certain behavioral characteristics that are expected. And to the extent that I do not fulfill that, I will not count myself on the among the ranks of atheists. Because it's the behavior of the leading atheist that are defining

“people's understanding of the word today. Yeah. That's why. Magnostic. Okay.”

And the only reason why. Otherwise, there'd be no question here. Okay. All right. Now, how do I deal with death as I get older? I'm thinking more and more about that. And the last chapter of my book, Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to read you those last two paragraphs. Okay. And then that'll give you all of the wisdom and insight you need to take to your father.

Speaking directly to you. So, I've thought long and hard about death. And yeah, I'd lean towards the scientific sense of death where your state of non-existence in death is not fundamentally different from your state of non-existence before you were born. Think about that. Before you were born, you weren't saying, "Where am I? How come I'm not anywhere?" You just had no existence. And my confidence in a non-existence

in death comes from people who've had many strokes. And with many strokes, different parts of your intellectual functioning go away. Bit by bit, your ability to recognize other people to know where you are,

“to remember to eat, to speak, to have short-term memory, long-term memory. And these are neuro-synaptic”

failures of the brain. So, in death, where there is no neuro-synaptic activity at all, to require of death that somehow your brain is restored into some newly functioning hole. For me, as a scientist, is unrealistic. But that doesn't alter other thoughts that I have. For example, we are made not figuratively but literally of star dust. We are of the stars. We are the same ingredients. The stars are made of our ingredients came from the stars. So it's not just that we are alive in the

universe. The universe is alive within us. And that's a gift of 20th-century astrophysics to civilization that borders on the spiritual. Okay, so now in death, you've got pretty much two choices

which is still there when you die. You have no neuro-synaptic thoughts, but your molecules were built

up from your lifetime of eating and exercising and the building of your organs and your muscles and other tissue. In death, those molecules still contain energy. If I'm buried and I decompose, all that energy gets absorbed by microbes by flora and fauna, dining upon my body, the way I have dined upon flora and fauna, my whole life. In that way, giving back to the earth. What I had taken, or literally borrowed, over my life. If you're cremated, the energy content of those molecules,

it doesn't go away. It gets transferred to heat. This is what heats the air column over the

crematorium. That then radiates infrared energy that was once the energy content of the molecules of your body radiates it out into space, moving at the speed of light. So, if after someone has been cremated, you can keep a timeline. Where has their radiant energy reached by now? If they died four years ago, if they were cremated four years ago, they would have reached the nearest star system, alpha century. 20 years ago, you can look at a map and see where that has touched. So,

that in a way, you're still a part of the universe. You're still in the universe, just in a different form. In order to presume you are fully alive and functioning, that requires religion, which is strongly based on belief systems rather than on anything science would tell you about it. I'd like to end, Zhao, with a reading from the last several paragraphs of a book I published a couple of years ago, Starry Messenger Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. I'd be reading from the last

“chapter titled Life and Death. Do you know? Do you really know how precious life is? The total”

number of people who have ever been born is about 100 billion. Yet the genetic code that generates

viable versions of us is capable of at least 10 to the 30th variations. That astronomical huge number is a one followed by 30 zeros, producing a million trillion possible souls. Each of us for all practical purposes is unique in the universe, now and forever. Being alive is the time to celebrate, being alive, every waking moment. Along the way, why not strive to make a world a better place today than yesterday, simply for the privilege of having

lived in it? On my deathbed, I'd be sad to miss the clever inventions and discoveries that arise from our collective human ingenuity, presuming the systems that foster such advances

“remain intact. That's what fueled the exponential growth of science and technology in my lifetime.”

I further wonder whether civilizations arc of social progress will continue with all its fits and starts and this reward any time traveler from the oppressed spectrum of humanity who choose to visit the future rather than the past. On the whole, I don't fear death. Instead, I fear a life where I could have accomplished more. An epitaph worthy of a tombstone come from the 19th century educator, Horace Man. I besiege you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words,

be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity. Our primal urge to keep looking up is surely greater than our primal urge to keep killing one another. If so, then human curiosity and wonder the twin chariot of cosmic discovery will ensure that starry messages continue to arrive. These insights compel us for our short time on earth to become better shepherds of our own civilization.

“Yes, life is better than death, but life is also better than having never been born.”

Each of us is alive against stupendous odds. We won the lottery only once. We get to invoke our

We get to bask in divine sunsets and sunrises and gaze deeply into the night skies they cradle.

“We get to live and ultimately die in this glorious universe.”

Jau, your father needs you now. He, whatever, are his ailments. He, in our alone in people whose lives have been hit by disease, ailments, accident, war, pestilence, regardless, we are the lucky ones because we got to be born

“at all. So I spent a lot of time wondering if I had never been born. You have to be born in order”

to then die. So the birth is a privilege and so is the death because that's the package of life that we're handed. And everybody else in that tent to the 30th variations of the human genome

will never know either end of that celebration of this universe. And that is a cosmic perspective.

Gary, Jauk, I love these here and from all the folks. And I'm sure they love hearing from you. Who are in the Star Talk family. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty cool group. Our fan base gets to see that our people got curiosity too, right? Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of people behind the scenes

“making the Star Talk happen. Right. Exactly. All right. I think that's a wrap. Gary. Yes.”

Cool to the day. Thanks for coming out. No. Pleasure, Neil. Always a pleasure. We're all that

we love you especially in that that a comedy special. Oh, you mean just smart enough that you can actually watch from the Star Talk main channel? Oh, that, that, that one, that one. That one. I forgot about that, but not as you mentioned it. Yeah. This has been another installment of Star Talk special edition. This is the burning questions from the Star Talk family of producers and editors coming in. And I delighted in that. I like being the

appointment for the burning sensations and all of you feel applied twice a day. It's good.

It's good. It's good. It's new by tomorrow. All right. Until we meet again as always. Keep looking