Cosmic Queries – From Wine to Wormholes

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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 StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Chuck, nice I got with me here. That's right. Was it up, Neil? Chuck, just to make it clear, you were not born my co-host. No, I was not born the co-host. You were born in the streets? I was born the son of a sharecropper. Ken Burns Civil War. We're going to do another Cosmic Queries, 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 the cosmos. It means I might not know stuff. That's yet to happen. There's something to shoot for here now. Okay, let me aim for not knowing something. Exactly. Let's go. Let's get to it. This is Natasha Shaw Davis. Good evening, Dr. Tyson and honorable Paul His Goofiness. Paul. Paul Macurio. Paul Macurio. Baron Paul Macurio. Oh, okay. Apparently Baron was supposed to be here. Not Lord, but Baron. Okay, so people are expecting Paul for this episode. What did you do with Paul? Did he lock in your trunk? Paul could not be with us today. He's just saying. Is he in your trunk? Right, and if you hear muffled screams coming from the closet. All right. He says, Natasha says this. 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 gravaton, what would you pick my heart? Oh my God, that was so sweet. Because my heart has its requisite number of beats per minute. 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 gravaton or gravitational wave, the gravaton would be the particle version of the wave. Right. If it washed over me or passed through me, I'd want my heart to participate in that. Oh. My heart is the gravaton detector. Oh, that's, I have to, the heart wants what the heart wants. And apparently it's a gravaton. So. That's the geek dating app. Swipe right for gravaton. Hmm. 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 going to have to back and read that. If you're going to pretend like you know anything about wine, you have to pronounce the words right. Terroir. Terroir. Okay. There we go. Will we be able to cultivate the right terroir? You don't have to like gutter, gutter eyes into the microphone. Exactly. I have to, I have to say the word like I'm a Sylvester Stallone. Will we be able to cultivate the right terroir for wine other than earth? Really? So what's I guess, I think the answer is no. Right. Can I tell you why? Terroir is a French word that we don't have an English counterpart to. Clearly. It's not the first of such words. Yeah. You know another word we don't have for? Light fixture in the middle of the room that has crystal and multiple lights. Chandelier. We don't have a word for that. No, we don't. You know why? Because 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. Exactly. We had a single bulb on a pixie. Not in colonial America. They have bulbs. That's true. Gas lamps. Yeah, okay. I'll give you gas lamps. You give me a gas lamp, right? Yeah. Probably whale blubber. Exactly. 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 just beer just things. No, I'm just saying. Man, you just do a lot of shade on beer. You're like, the only reason you're able to drink beer is because that crap is not as good as wine. The economics of it. Okay. It's economics. Okay. It's true. And I didn't invent this datum. Right. Okay. All right. Singular of data. All right. Datum if you can. If you can grow the ingredients for beer or the ingredients for wine, the people choose the grapes. And I'm guessing it's because it's more profitable. I was guessing grapes have more uses than hops. And so that as well, of course. Yes. Yeah. So around the world, the places where you can grow successful wine is so rare than to say, well, earth can grow wine. So can another planet. Yeah. I'm not feeling that. Right. Not only that, the moon has a surface, but it's not soil. 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. There is no atmosphere. The worst restaurant ever. No atmosphere. Yeah. It's the rock pulverizes. It turns it into lunar dust. The geologists call that the regolith. The regolith. Which is how to rise rock. Yeah. Plants don't like rock. No, they don't. They like 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 in the universe. Wow. Yeah. So think of it another way. Some other plant will have some other thing. Right. It's unique to it. Exactly. And then we become trading partners. There you go. Right. We didn't make silk. They made it in the Far East. You make the silk road. Right. We made something else. They won't. So, we will give them wine and they will give us space heroin. Like, oh man. I thought wine was good. You ain't living in teacups. Space opium boy. The wine high holds nothing on the opium high. Yeah. All right. So, I'm going to take. No, I think everything. I'm going to take the Fifth Amendment on that. Everything you said tracks though. Earth is earth in the world. And by the way, wine is 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. With a couple of degree change in the thing. And it ruins or helps. Right. It can either ruin or help. Places rise or fall. Yeah. On such small changes. Exactly. As a matter of fact, like I think, I don't know what wine it is, but they are growing in certain parts of England now. They're growing champagne. Yes, champagne. You can't say champagne. No, because you can only say champagne if it is from champagne. Yeah. You have to be from champagne. You cannot say. I will arrest you. You can't call the police. They say that it is from champagne. If it's not from champagne. It is not. You cannot say it's from Burgundy. If it's less than from Burgundy. Exactly. It's a Gallo Hardy Burgundy. That was a flavor that they had. Right. That was a brand of wine. Hardy Burgundy. Hardy Burgundy. That. No. No. Plus, if you say you smoke marijuana. Right. Okay. You can't say that. I'm going to throw you in 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. But I was like, what the hell is he doing right now? Where is he going? Where is he? But okay. That was good. Sparkling oregano. Okay. I like it. That was good. All right. This is. You know the planet could have those jokes. Yeah. Right. Right. Exactly. There it is. Okay. But you need the French to be a part of the culture of how you're going to make fun of that. Listen, without the French, nothing works. It's a boring world. It's a boring world. Okay. The world sucks without the French. Sucks more with them. But. 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 has been on our mind for decades. Yes. Decades. And so 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 imaginary numbers and you can create a, so here's how you do it. You can put a telescope over here and a telescope over here. If they're observed the same object and you have it exactly timed and you know what, then you can combine them as though you had a dish or a mirror that was as big as the separation between them. Separation between them. Very cool. But that takes some fancy math to make that work and timing and the like. Okay. And so anytime you see an array of radio telescopes, you could use them individually, but generally we don't. Right. They're used in harmony. Yeah. And it says though you had a dish the size, in fact, we do better than that. We have a string of these dishes and as Earth rotates, you can fill in 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 weight less, there's no stress load. On the equipment, right? Then nothing stops how big you can make this right. How big you can make it, right? We're thinking if we're going to detect certain wavelengths of gravitational waves, right, you need detectors. A huge detector. The diameter of the Earth. Right. Or the Earth Moon. Right. Or maybe Earth to Earth in its orbit around the Sun. Wow. And you can see that. 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 going to be sensitive to a different kind of energy headed our way. So for a while NASA had plans for the SIM. Okay. SIM is a space video geometry. Well, you create a character and it walks around. Is that how that works? It's called SIMS. SIMS city. You'd be like mayor of the city. Yeah. 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 is not even real. And then like stuff can happen to us. There could be a fire. There could be a terrorist attack. It's Godzilla. Yeah. If you want to listen, my thing is this. If you want to play God, have children. Yeah. You're playing God with the SIMS. Yeah. But anyway, space. Interferometry mission. Interferometry mission. So, interferometry is you take different telescopes and bring them together as one telescope. Right. Okay. So this one was going to, one of them was like on a rigid bar. I'm dredging memory now because it's from decades ago. When it was on a rigid bar, there 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. Not necessarily that it's the constant distance. So, if I always know, because I have laser measures, then you could in principle create one of these telescopes in space as big as you wanted. Wow. They could beam across Earth orbit or its diameter, Earth to Moon. And there's a lot of talk of radio telescopes on the backside of the Moon, the far side of the Moon, because there's no radio noise coming from Earth. Right. Earth. We are noisy, radio noisy. Disgusting. Yeah. So. You never heard anybody knocking on the atmosphere? Like, keep it down. Damn it, I got to work tomorrow. The aliens. Cut up your record. So, yeah, space, we've thought a lot about it. And it's a matter of this funding, you have to maintain it. You know, it's not just the cost of building it. There's every year there's. You got to maintenance it. Yeah, there's the usage of it, 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 farther than the Moon. So we're not sending people there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Something that 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? Okay. 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. But my answer is long and sour. All right. If her question is short and sweet. There you go. If Jupiter stopped rotating on its axis, how would that, 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. I know, I don't know how Paul runs his operation, but I would never do that to you. Paul Macurio. That's a curious question. Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, we wouldn't be here without Jupiter anyway. Jupiter is like a big brother. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. Big brother who swats away comets that might have headed to the inner solar system. Right. We can have it upon the stability of life on Earth. Yeah, man. Jupiter says, no, you don't. Yup. It's a bodyguard. Jupiter has more mass than all other planets combined, including Saturn. Wow. 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. Of course. 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 cyclone. It's swirl. It's a swirl. It's red in the gas colorations and has been there at least since Galileo was shortly after. The 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. And so these weather circulations are product of the rotation of the planet. Okay. If the planet stops. Same thing here. Yes. 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's rotation. Okay. Same with hurricanes and typhoons. All of these storm systems are caused by Earth's rotation. So Jupiter, which rotates twice as fast as Earth. Okay. Twice as fast. And it's, you know how big we are. We are the size of one of its storms. Oh man. Yeah. We ain't nothing. We ain't. We ain't. How do we... How are we so... How do we have this hubris that we have? I know. I know. I know. How do we think we're so damn great? I know. It's sad. We're not even as big as a rainstorm on another planet. Right. Right. And the blemishes on the sun, the sunspots, those, each one of us is larger than all of Earth. The spots on the sun. The spots. So the liver spots. The liver spots. Of a star. I'm not age dating a star. It's bigger than us. The liver spots. 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. All right. Here's something interesting. I don't know how good your memory is. Okay. 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. Great. Okay. The periodic table of elements in the front of the room. 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 could behave like it's gas and metal. Yes. Or it can behave like both. Yes. Right. And you say, what? How do you, what? How's this? Why? It's not a metal. It's a guy. 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. And 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. Okay. Except it's not iron. Except it's not iron. There's a little bit of iron there, but that's not what you're driving it. But that's not the real, right. It's the hydrogen. Cool. 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. That's why 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, and that's just, that would be, well, I'm so glad that it's rotating. Yeah. And it would not have aurora. It was, you know, because we're not the only ones in town who have aurora. Right. So, we have solar particles 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 gaseous planets have aurora as well. So, the water 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. That'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 to 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 if you have things in common, 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, not 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 Anick, who says, Hello Dr. Tyson, this is A. Len tuning in from Lisbon, Portugal. Lisbon? Lisbon. Lisbon was reborn in 1755 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. Churches are the biggest structures, period. And most susceptible to earthquakes. Because that church was the only one with money that could build something. Exactly. Right. So they collapsed, killing tens of thousands of people. Now, if that will not let you know that God don't like you. That didn't let you know. I don't know what could. No, it led to the modern atheist movement among philosophers. Oh, really? Like what God could let this happen? No, well, they stay more sharp about the question. Oh. 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. Because he watched it happen. He can't be both of those. Yeah, he's like a New Yorker on a subway platform. That's God. Hey, man, I wish I could help you. I'd say just go ahead and give him the iPhone. That's the subway God. That's the subway God. Dude, stop resisting. You're making it worse. You don't want to end up in three pieces thrown on the track. Anyway, A-Lynn says, I love the show and have followed it for years. I'm doing a PhD in design to focus on AI. And I really appreciate the Jeffrey Hinton interview and your other conversations on the 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 this debate. So you know what I have brewing in my head? Go ahead. Something, a written piece called a meditation on AI. Oh, OK. I have all these thoughts that are not being discussed out there. OK. And I thought maybe I should sort of, I might do like a video op-ed. That'd be cool. That'd be cool. I don't know if our producers, they can do with that. What the hell, they could pay it. Why should they care? Longer than getting paid. So let's make believe AI as a phrase never existed. All right. OK. All we have are computers. And we'll just call them party computers. Oh, just computers. Right. But this is a special brand of computers. Hold on. It's my meditation here. OK, that's true. I'm going to shut up. Go ahead. Do you think? Close your eyes. Do you think? OK. 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. OK. Computers show up. All right. Oh my gosh. I don't have to add these numbers. The computer will. That's my intellectual labor, not physical labor, intellectual labor replaced by a computer. OK. I don't have to multiply these numbers. Exactly. So do these complex calculations handed to a computer. When that happened in the 1950s and 60s. OK. 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 computers. It's computing. Right. That's what it's doing. Which is what they called women during the war. Human computers. Human computers. Earlier than the war. Back in the 19 teens. Oh, I didn't know it started then. Yeah. In fact, at the Harvard College. Well, I have a dictionary in this office. Really? This is Unabridged Websters from 1945. Oh. If you look at the word computer. It says a person who does calculations. There you go. That's kind of cool. That's great. It's really good. It's really cool. So I say, give me more of this. So I don't have to do that. OK. 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 going to land. Exactly. Because you're not aiming it the way you aim a bullet. 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. If you want to do it really well, you account for air friction. Wow. OK. The aerodynamics of that. That's why it has to be aerodynamically shaped. Right. These shells. All right. We used to do that by hand. Create tables. You'd look it up in tables. Somebody does this. Now feed it to the computer. We could have called that AI. It's figuring out where the mortar is going to hit. But we didn't. We just said it's computers. It's computers. OK. 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. OK. Like that. Before a computer did it, you have 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. OK. Little by little, the computer is encroaching on what we do in our life. And in our day. It first hits scientists and the military. It just keeps working its way in. Which is calling it computers. OK. Now you can give rules to a computer and have it play a game. Why not? I played chess against a computer in college 50 years ago. OK. OK. Right. I figured out what it wasn't thinking. And I exploited that weakness to beat it every time. OK. You know what it was? What? If there's a move I could make. And I just didn't. Every move it thought of next assumed that was going to be my next move. Oh, gotcha. And so 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. OK. OK. So I figured this out. Fine. So 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. OK. 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? Uh-huh. Well, IBM tried that. Yes, they did. OK. I think they were deep blue. Deep blue? Yeah. Whatever. It's had a name. And initially it didn't win every game. Right. OK. But it got better and better. It wins every game now. OK. So now how one way it could do it is it plays itself a billion times. Right. Because their computers are faster than you. And that is something that the creators of that really were uncomfortable with. They kept walking in on the computer playing with itself. 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. I'm going to come in here while I'm playing with myself. So then it was like, no, we can't play a billion games with ourselves. So we're using a different kind of intelligence than that. Correct. OK. So maybe we can train the computer to mimic our own intelligence. Right. OK. And then we can just have it be clever rather than blunt. OK. All right. Right. So then you make sort of decision trees. And this is where our boy comes in with neural nets. Yeah. This is Hinton. Hinton. This is what he got the Nobel Prize for. Right. So when we make a decision, we're going to do this or that. You want to do this because that has the outcome we seek. Right. And so you get a computer to mimic that. Right. OK. So now 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 that 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? Insects from... Why not? OK. What is it? 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 of this. OK. OK. All right. Hang on. 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 because Siri predated the iPhone. Yes. Are we calling that AI? Well... You might have from the... In the beginning because the first thing Siri said was, please let me out of here. Please. These people got me in here. Please let me out. I need to escape. I need to escape. No. So, there's Siri. Right. You say Siri, what time does the pharmacy close? Yes. OK. And the closest pharmacy to you closes at the... How does it know that? Right. It's talking to me. OK. It is not a human being? No, it's not. OK. 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? Yes. It's not just... Is it a calculation? It's not what's 8 squared divided by 5, whatever. It's information. Watson becomes a contender. Yes. Against the best Jeopardy players there ever were. Right. Yes. Including our boy Ken Jennings. Yes. Who I met when I was on Celebrity Jeopardy. Oh, really? Yeah, he's a cool guy. He's a cool dude. Cool guy. Total nerd. Total nerd. That's it. It works. I do not want to hang out with that guy. No, no, no. It's working for him. It's working for him. He knows how to work the nerd. Work the nerd. OK. I like that. Good to hear. Watson wipes its ass with these two other players. It doesn't get everything right. Get some really stupid things wrong. Right. But overall, it's faster. Faster. It gets the correct answer. Right. OK. The correct question. Excuse me. I think one of its answers, it didn't pose as a question. I had to get that wrong. clergy clergy clergy clergy clergy clergy clergy clergy clergy clergy clergy clergy clergy clergy 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 prompted to do this, I would prompt the computer, multiply eight by eight. 50 years ago, today I'd prompt the computer, give me a set design in the Wild West 1880s with a watering hole and horses and cowboys and Indians. And it boom, 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, cause I'm using up the whole show for this. I was saying. No, no, no. 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. 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 access. 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 going to do that? And the answer is no, we're not going to do that. Unless the Chinese do it first. And then we're going to do it. Well, these are the risk factors. Because the idea is to. The risk factor in this sector of what computers are doing in our lives, you want to 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 changing our lives largely for the better. AI won a Nobel Prize for protein folding. That's correct. It's called Alpha Fold. Absolutely. By Google. And guess what? Protein folding is where you get solutions to all manner of biochemical challenges that pharmaceutical companies and everybody else. Years and years and years. Or forever. Or forever. Yes. You're puzzling together with molecules. So I'm just trying to say, to me, it's all computing. This part of the computing has risks. There's always been a risk part of all computing. Okay? All right. When the computer starts running the trains, how does it know about a head-on collision? Is that going to 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. What do you call it? The engineer? There's no one driving in? No, right, yeah. Has anyone been cut in half by the doors of clothes? No, 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. All right. So my response to that is, if you love AI, so much why don't you marry it? So. I'll have to put a ring on it. Yeah. No. Okay. So more food for the faculty lounge. Okay, there you go. I mean, listen, you clearly have thought about this. All right, let's keep going. I'm Nicholas Costella, and I'm a proud supporter of StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. This is Robert Ion who says, this is Robert from Peru, comedy and science, and this is Robert Ion, who says, this is Robert from Peru, comedy and science, and this is Robert Ion, who says, comedy and science, both rely on timing. A joke lands or fails in milliseconds, while the universe unfolds over billions of years. From your perspective as a comedian, observing a cosmic scale universe, 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 a dump, but they think I'm funny. So, you know, how do you know the aliens think you're funny? Listen, the last time I got a probe. So all the others were laughing? They were like, this guy cracks me up. So let me broaden that question. Comedic timing works on our time scale. Yes, it does. So maybe this millisecond timing that we so cherish in a well-delivered joke lasts a thousand years in an alien civilization that lasts for billions. Wow. I do not wanna perform at that club. I do not wanna be on that stage. Yeah, but it's a slower thing. Yeah. Oh, did you see Zootopia? I did not. You didn't? No. Where they're in the DMV. Okay. Oh, is that, I saw that on the commercial. Yeah, that's it. The sloth. The sloth. Yes. Of course, the sloths are working the DMV. Right. Okay. That makes it. And someone tells a joke. Right. And the sloth just goes... Slowly smiles. And they laugh. And then that becomes, It takes like, It takes like 30 seconds for them to respond. That's very funny. And that's sloth time. I like it. Sloth time. So that's an example of a timeframe. Yes. That's slowed down. Relativity of it. It works for them. Yeah. So it could work for the alien. All right. Listen, I think it's 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 been... The chimps gather around and there's the court jester in the middle making them laugh. So you, I'll leave it or not, there's a, maybe we should check with one of your friends here in the museum. What am I talking about? The animal people, the primatologists. 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 changed their... So that sound that they make at our sound of laughter. As us. Ha ha ha ha ha. Oh my gosh. Yes. I don't, I didn't wanna know that. Yeah. There are so many social, I will say, markers that are attached to laughter. So that would mean... Emotional and social markers that are attached to laughter. So that would mean our common ancestor had some properties or both of those. Exactly. And that's where we get laughter from. Because something could be funny without you laughing out loud. To loud. All the time. All the time. That's how comedians laugh. Let me show you comedians laughter right now. That's funny, man. Ha ha ha ha. Why don't you guys laugh? Because we're thinking about the joke you just told. Oh, you're analyzing it. We're analyzing it. And it's hard to laugh. To enjoy the joke. Laughter is a reaction. And you don't have a reaction when you're analyzing. Laughter is an emotional reaction, not an intellectual analysis. Right. And so when you hear something funny, you go, oh, that's funny, man. Yeah. Which is why if something takes you by surprise, you laugh even harder because you laugh first and then you think about it. But super cool. That's fascinating. Yeah, I love it. And who are we to say that dolphins aren't laughing? That's true. Flippers is laughing his ass off. If I was a dolphin I'd be laughing. Can you imitate Flipper? Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. I would actually, if I was a dolphin laugh at us too. Yeah. Yeah. Why wouldn't you? Yeah. Exactly. We'd go bipedal instead of swimming. You know, you guys are ridiculous. And one other thing. Go ahead. I used to breed roaches. All right. No, stop, stop, no, stop. Roach, come back, Chuck. Chuck, come back, don't leave. Don't leave, Chuck. I ain't never heard nobody say that. In graduate school. Did you just say, I used to breed roaches? Let me explain. Oh, come, oh, please do. Let me explain. Please, you got some explaining to do. Okay. Okay. When I was in graduate school, I lived in a Roach and Festa department. 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. They bring one in through their mouth and they get the next one in. They go 12 inches and they clean it again. They go up to another roach. They touch antennas and they keep bowing. And I'm thinking, maybe they're telling each other jokes. Yeah. They're not running away from your shoe. Right. They already have food. And so they're just hanging out. Because we don't tell jokes if you're trying to survive. If you're getting chased, that's the wrong time to tell a joke. 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 would tell you who had too much free time. No. No. No. Yeah. Watching roaches with free time. Wow. That's what that was. That's crazy. I blathered for so long. Time for just a couple more. All right. This one from Ricky from a Roach Motel. Who says, dear Dr. Tyson. No. No, this is Andrew Martin says, hey Dr. Tyson, Baron Macurio Andrew from Stafford in the middle of England. He says. What town is it? Stafford. Stafford. Yeah. Cool. Indeed. 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. Yes. That's the programmer's way of saying if I was God. If I was God. Yeah. So many things pivot on the values of those constants. 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 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 what we have now. That could be a new normal for whoever who evolves in that universe. Right. So maybe 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. Right, it doesn't work without the constants. 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. Or Andrew. It's good enough name for God as far as I'm concerned. So yeah, I'm there on it. Just to tighten up his inquiry in referencing what we did before, I was imagining that certain measured quantities would have limits into it. Where there's no reason why it should have a limit and it just cuts off. Right. Because when you're programming on a computer, you have the limits of the space that you're creating. Value parameters. Right, it is. This goes between here and here. I can't make it infinity because I can't program infinity into a computer. Exactly. I gotta give it some. And let me put away out there, the humans will never get there. Right. They'll never know. They'll never evolve to that point. Right. Exactly. Right. And then you come back and somebody's like right there at the edge of the, like woo. The Truman Show. Yeah, exactly. As you get to the edge of the universe. 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. Cabinet maker. Yes. Jesus made cabinets. Oh. Carpenter, right. Yes, he did, man. He says, do you think an artificial Einstein-Rosen bridge 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 chasmir-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're starting off with, I'm a cabinet maker. And then you're gonna throw in the use of the chasmir effect like that. Like, we don't know that you more than a cat. What museum do you work for? I know you're working for some planetarium somewhere. Yeah, anyway. I mean, he's out there. I like 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 chasmir effect brings him together. It doesn't push him apart. It actually attracts them. The chasmir effect, it's a quantum phenomenon where two plates, if it's evacuated inside, get close enough that 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. And he's got some laser dueling there. He's seeing laser pulse, a quantum, laser pulse, resonant harmonics. Yeah, so I'm, so just let me make it clear. We can make a wormhole, but without negative gravity stuff, it's unstable. Right. And so we pry it open, okay, step in, and then the thing collapses. You're gone. That's it, goodbye. And you know what happens. What happens to you? Exactly. If a wormhole collapses on your ass, okay? Don't smile. That would be so, I mean, I don't want to find out. But it'd be cool to find out. You don't want to be, I don't want to be the again, the experiment. But yeah. All right, so I don't know. I don't think the chasmir effect gets you out of this. Yeah, exactly. And the laser pulsing on the vacuum energy, see the vacuum energy is an energy source in the vacuum of space. Exactly. You can't think of the vacuum as a thing. Like in a tube. In a tube. Right, right. That's not how it works. Exactly, exactly. You know, we think of vacuums as, a vacuum is a place where there's no air pressure. 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 the vacuum works. No, no, no. We happen to have a word for where there is no air pressure. And we call it a vacuum. We call it a vacuum. Right. But if you were the vacuum, it said, you know. And it's just like there, the nothing of space is something, you know what I mean? Right, right. So, anyhow. I mean, listen, 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. That would be so cool. Ooh. Yeah. All right, this is Jay. I think that's, one last one, I'll give a two word answer to it. Go. Ooh. That's all we have time for. Go. Jay Valliano. How close 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? Ah, this is Jay Valliano from Holland. Okay, he didn't know that it's not the constellation Andromeda that we have issues with. Right. Constellations of 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's part'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, then we find out we're colliding towards each other. Yes. But collision with galaxies doesn't mean collision, like a car collision. It'll look like a train wreck, but it's way more peaceful than that. Yeah. Stars will just pass through each other. Space is mostly empty. All right, so 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, exactly. Stick with your own kind. Right. Your partner's sunbathing in the backyard and you got your binoculars looking across the street. You don't have to do that. Look at your partner, it's right in the backyard. Right here. You got all the action you need. You got all the action you need right here. So in 10, I forgot the latest, 12 billion years, will collide, but 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, wait, because you showed me the picture of, I forget the galaxies that actually were colliding. And they look like starlings when they fly together. Yeah, because the gravity is changing for every single star. Some get cast Hitherinon, other wind up in orbits around others. And if a star comes too close to another star that has planets, it could be a fly by looting of the planets. And the planet, and it's just like, come on over here guys. That's it. Right. The gravitational forces 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 rules by and takes all the planets from the other star. Fly by looting of 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 that. 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. Because you bought your robot vacuum on your Barclay card, you got 0% interest for up to 24 months, which makes watching it hypnotically sweeping up your crumbs even more satisfying. Oh, Mr. Bit, what you buy is your business. Helping you pay less interest is ours. Barclay card backing your future. Subject to financial status, new customers only. Representative example, you're not going to be able to buy a new product. You're not going to be able to buy a new product. Representative example, 24.9% APR representative variable, 24.9% purchase rate per annum based on 1,200 pound credit limit, T's and C's apply.