Making Science Cool, with Jeff Goldblum

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Speaker 4 Hey, Star Talkians, Neil here.

Speaker 5 You're about to listen to an episode specially drawn from our archives to serve your cosmic curiosities.

Speaker 7 Check it out.

Speaker 9 Welcome to Star Talk,

Speaker 10 your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Speaker 5 Star Talk begins right now.

Speaker 13 My co-host tonight comedian Chuck Nice.

Speaker 14 Hey, hey!

Speaker 15 Chuck in the house!

Speaker 16 Tweeting a Chuck Nice comic. Thank you, sir.
Yes.

Speaker 13 And also joining us tonight is a colleague of mine at the museum, paleontologist, Ross McPhee.

Speaker 14 Ross! Ross!

Speaker 18 Out! Boom!

Speaker 19 Thank you.

Speaker 23 You're curator of mammals right here at the American Museum of Natural History, and you travel the world digging up fossils to learn about extinct animals.

Speaker 25 Is that like what your business card says?

Speaker 26 It should. Okay.

Speaker 27 It should.

Speaker 12 That'd be good lines.

Speaker 17 Yeah, very good.

Speaker 28 So thanks for joining us on Star Talk.

Speaker 29 We're featuring my interview with geek actor Jeff Goblin.

Speaker 16 And he plays scientists with a swagger, right, from the Blockbuckster film Independence Day and, of course, in Jurassic Park.

Speaker 28 So I asked him how his sort of iconic scientist character in Jurassic Park came to be.

Speaker 30 Let's check it out.

Speaker 31 Well, it was beautifully scripted. You know, I'm sure you read Michael Creighton's book.
Yeah. All that, you know.
And then Steven Spielberg, and they'd written a beautiful script.

Speaker 31 So it was really that character.

Speaker 32 But I did try to influence, I did have this idea that, you know,

Speaker 31 I could hip it up a little.

Speaker 6 Well, right, because there's swagger, you know.

Speaker 16 Swagger isn't always in the script.

Speaker 32 I don't, well, it wasn't. Well, it was maybe a little bit.

Speaker 31 Richard Attenborough has that line. You know, I bring a scientist, you bring a rock star.
So somebody calls me a rock star.

Speaker 31 So I thought, hey, I have license to shop for a jacket that I think will be, I kind of had lobbied for a few articles of clothing.

Speaker 21 What year was that? That was 90.

Speaker 16 93. Okay.

Speaker 28 That may have been the first ever

Speaker 24 badass geek person portrayed in movies.

Speaker 22 I mean, think about that.

Speaker 16 Well, there you are, brilliant mathematician.

Speaker 16 You're glib.

Speaker 23 You're clever. You've got philosophical points.

Speaker 6 you're good-looking, and you got a little kind of, you got presence.

Speaker 35 This was breaking stereotypes, I think.

Speaker 31 Yeah, I think so too. And it's important.
I'm sure you have feelings about this. I'm passionate that smart people not be

Speaker 31 undervalued.

Speaker 24 Yeah, smart people have feelings too, and they have attitudes and things that are never

Speaker 35 not previously ever explored.

Speaker 31 Right. And their contribution of intelligence is in itself sexy and valuable.

Speaker 31 Good point.

Speaker 24 Intelligence as a point of sexy.

Speaker 31 Yeah, you're using geeky. I see now because you're using geeky to kind of agree with the conventional thinking of geeky, smart is geeky.

Speaker 31 I don't call a smart person a geek. You know, geek is originally the term is usually, it originally comes from circus life.
You know, geeks were the people who bit,

Speaker 31 for entertainment, bit heads off of live chickens.

Speaker 24 I didn't know that.

Speaker 31 Well, I think that's where it comes from. And then it became, you know, a smart person.
But, you know, the next logical step is the movie idiocracy,

Speaker 31 where anybody who can read a little bit is called, oh, you're a sissy or you're a geek. You know, that's where that goes.

Speaker 16 No, no, no. It's a future where...

Speaker 21 There's the dumbing down of the population of the world.

Speaker 31 We see where that goes and could go further. No, no, we must uphold and champion, as you do better than I do,

Speaker 31 intelligence as beautiful, sexy, powerful, virile.

Speaker 14 Chuck, did he, did he, did he pull us off in the movie?

Speaker 37 I don't know, man.

Speaker 37 I think he's super sexy.

Speaker 38 You know what I mean? Okay.

Speaker 39 Did you notice his reaction, though, when you said he was sexy?

Speaker 36 Yeah.

Speaker 17 I said good looking.

Speaker 40 You said, yeah, he was like,

Speaker 17 right. So, Ross.

Speaker 41 Yeah.

Speaker 13 What was your reaction to Jurassic Park when it came out?

Speaker 19 Implausible, but great.

Speaker 11 Impossible.

Speaker 17 Implausible. Not impossible.

Speaker 19 Oh, well, you want to make a fine distinction. You're not going to bring dinosaurs back with ancient DNA.

Speaker 42 You're such a spoils board.

Speaker 41 So what?

Speaker 19 The show as science fiction, emphasis on fiction, was fantastic. And in fact, science, in a real sense, did play a role.
Things were explained.

Speaker 17 It wasn't wasn't just assumed.

Speaker 16 Oh, right.

Speaker 21 There was that descriptive section where they talk about evolution and embryos and this sort of thing.

Speaker 35 So that had some academic value.

Speaker 26 Yeah,

Speaker 19 I think so.

Speaker 27 No, you don't, Ross.

Speaker 19 I don't know why you, I don't know why you did that.

Speaker 37 Exactly.

Speaker 40 You just let us know exactly how you really felt.

Speaker 19 Here's what I liked about Jeff Goldblum: he put the badass in glasses.

Speaker 19 Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 20 That's called bad glass.

Speaker 19 So professional scientists have the reputation that they can't talk to the public, right? You've got this guy quite in contrast to...

Speaker 41 Yeah.

Speaker 19 But I don't think that's true. And I think it's increasingly true that we're very interested in talking to the public.

Speaker 19 And whether that comes through from interviews like this, that we're going to have or through movies, there's an interest, there's practically even a need for people to be better informed about science.

Speaker 19 It's just interesting. And that's the point.

Speaker 17 So how about the part where they're just dusting

Speaker 29 a fossil and the fossil just pops out of the ground?

Speaker 27 It could happen.

Speaker 20 Really?

Speaker 28 Because I've seen videos of you guys.

Speaker 23 That's a hard thing, getting a fossil out of the ground.

Speaker 19 It can be. It really depends.
So if you're talking Cretaceous dinosaurs, it's mostly going to be rock.

Speaker 19 Jackhammers are the sorts of things that you need most of the time but i deal with much more recently extinct organisms and like like the ones from the movie the ice ice age

Speaker 19 right

Speaker 19 yeah

Speaker 19 perhaps not cartoon characters i was thinking more 10 000 bc

Speaker 38 okay yeah not as much fun as the little squirrel with the nut but that's okay

Speaker 19 you had saber-tooth tigers then didn't you no 10 000 years ago we certainly did yeah okay and mammals

Speaker 21 that have disappeared we were coming out of the ice age so so i just arrived at this museum when jurassic park came out so i i only got sort of bits of the mood and emotion did we see institutionally a rise in public interest towards dinosaurs after jurassic park came out absolutely you know up until that time mammals sort of ruled in paleontology dinosaurs were seen as kind of an evolutionary dead end

Speaker 19 but with jurassic park and the animations showing that dinosaurs were, in some cases, extremely athletic, able to move around a great speed and things like that, bite lawyers,

Speaker 19 this really changed things.

Speaker 13 So since then, what are some big discoveries in the last 20 years, let's say?

Speaker 19 For things that I'm working on, the The biggest change, I guess, would be moving not away from bones, but toward genetics so that we're able to get ancient DNA from things that are not too old and do increasingly a lot with them.

Speaker 19 We're learning a heck of a lot about species that are no longer with us as to basic physiological processes and things of this nature that we never would have guessed we could get.

Speaker 44 Just from bones.

Speaker 16 From bones.

Speaker 19 There'd be no way.

Speaker 6 So in Jurassic Park 1, there's...

Speaker 14 the now famous line uttered by Jeff Goldblum, which is, you scientists are so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop and think if they should.

Speaker 33 So let's start out with Jeff's reaction to the ethical implications of that line. Check it out.

Speaker 31 That's very interesting. I want to talk to you about that and canvas your feeling because I'm interested in seeing what I can contribute to that conversation.

Speaker 23 It would be nice because you started it.

Speaker 9 Right, right.

Speaker 31 So maybe you can help me. Maybe before I leave here, you can even enhance my thinking about it.

Speaker 31 So here's what my current thinking is that, well, I'll just tell you what's happened in this last, in this next version that's coming out without ruining anything, we talk about some issues that came up in the one 25 years ago.

Speaker 31 I talked again about science and ethics.

Speaker 28 Issues.

Speaker 24 I like that. How polite.

Speaker 14 Dinosaurs eating people.

Speaker 42 We call these issues.

Speaker 31 Well, that's true, but especially these issues that I am thinking about and my character talks about, which is ethics around science and all that.

Speaker 31 That line in the one 20 years ago, maybe now we want to tweak it a little bit where there's no ambiguity in what we're saying, which is that

Speaker 31 we shouldn't deprecate science at all. We shouldn't indict science at all.
And we tweaked my little speech, so I say something about whether it's still in the movie, Glorious Science.

Speaker 31 I say something about the wonderful investigative curiosity and the continuum of the scientific approach is a wonderful thing, but it's the exploitation and the non-ethical

Speaker 31 use of it for profit, screwy entertainment, cheap entertainment, heaven forbid, forbid, militarism, etc.

Speaker 31 Nationalism, you know, etc., that must be fought with every breath in our bodies, something like that.

Speaker 21 All of those thoughts went through my head when I heard you utter that line 20 years ago.

Speaker 31 Really? Except one could

Speaker 31 be scientists. Yeah, these scientists, these Frankensteins, Dr.
Frankensteins, they got to be, you got to watch those guys.

Speaker 21 Yeah, you're, I said to myself, he's blaming scientists. Oh, good.
And

Speaker 16 I said, scientists don't actually have the power that you think.

Speaker 35 Their actual power comes from governments and legislations and funding sources that have priorities that go beyond what a scientist does in the lab.

Speaker 21 And then they decide how they want to use it. But I said, all right, it's a movie.

Speaker 16 We got to let the line go. Yeah, but now I said to myself at the time.

Speaker 31 Yes. See if you like.
I don't know if you've seen it yet, but see if you like this new one where I think we're clearer and we tweaked that. So

Speaker 31 don't blame science.

Speaker 21 Ross, how do you feel about the urge of some to blame science for the fallout of the applications of science in the world?

Speaker 19 Here's how I feel about it. It's yin-yang.

Speaker 19 You want progress. Progress comes from science.
Can it be misused? Of course it can. And there is nothing that an individual can do except be well informed on what the issues are.

Speaker 19 So when this kind of misuse does come up, like in weaponization of space, that people speak out against it, that they're an informed electorate.

Speaker 38 I'm blaming scientists.

Speaker 27 Why? Well, you can do that.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I saw that.

Speaker 19 But it's like this young man said, they're powerless.

Speaker 19 Their products are used by people who do have power.

Speaker 17 So do you have issues with Goldblum movies for this reason?

Speaker 38 No, I just love the fact that he called getting eaten by dinosaurs issues.

Speaker 8 So Ross, in your field, do you have controversial ethical issues going on right now?

Speaker 35 And I think specifically about,

Speaker 21 because you said now it's a genetic analysis, not just what bones fit together in a puzzle.

Speaker 42 So

Speaker 16 about cloning, gene editing, that sort of thing.

Speaker 19 Here's the idea, that we can now go into the genome, to the genetic material of a species and alter it in a way that is favorable to us or perhaps favorable to to the organism.

Speaker 19 It depends on what the problem is.

Speaker 17 So in a way, you're playing God.

Speaker 19 Now, that brings up all kinds of issues about what the heck you think you're doing.

Speaker 19 My view of it is nature by itself is not subject to human ethics. It's not that there's good and that there's bad, it's just the way it is.
It just is.

Speaker 19 But to the degree that we interfere with nature, which is inevitable given the numbers of us on the planet, you have to ask the question, where do you want to stop?

Speaker 19 And where I personally want us to stop is to intervene as little as possible in the parts of the planet where we haven't made a complete screw-up. So that includes parts of the ocean.

Speaker 19 It also includes parts of the continents where humans are not as ubiquitous as they are in most other places. Make those sanctuaries, make them safe.

Speaker 11 Keep us out.

Speaker 21 No humans allow.

Speaker 20 No humans allow.

Speaker 28 That's beautiful.

Speaker 20 That's very nice. Yeah, raw.

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Speaker 55 I'm Nicholas Costello, and I'm a proud supporter of Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Speaker 34 De-extinction, would you bring back T-Rex, the dodo bird,

Speaker 15 or none of the above?

Speaker 56 I think the world has to work for everyone.

Speaker 15 Nice, very important.

Speaker 31 I think that's a good credo.

Speaker 31 The world should work forever.

Speaker 16 Let's make a world that works for everyone.

Speaker 31 Whatever works means, and I think we know what that means. Nothing mysterious about that.

Speaker 42 Works for everyone.

Speaker 31 So, in thinking just about the, and this is not to poo-poo my successful franchise, participation in the successful franchise, but no, no. Well, my character says this is a bad idea.

Speaker 28 It's a bad idea.

Speaker 31 Evolution had its say. Darwin is a hero of mine.
Evolution had its say, and the dinosaurs went out from the universe.

Speaker 56 That's their shake.

Speaker 31 A story that the universe told, and now it's our turn, and like that. And yes, especially, you want to bring it back for, because you want to make an amusement park? You want to sell some tickets?

Speaker 31 Because, you know, I would say no. I would say no about that, certainly.
Now, if it's just pure knowledge, like

Speaker 31 splitting the atom, is there something about resurrecting? That means we could bring back everybody who's ever died, I guess. or every species that's ever been.

Speaker 31 You know, we'd have to talk about that. But before we get into dinosaurs, aren't there,

Speaker 31 aren't they, aren't elephants, aren't all the species, not only the beauty, beautiful human species, but every other species, aren't they infinitely mysterious and magical and worthy of our respect and awe and protection?

Speaker 31 Elephants, you know what we're doing with elephants that are, if we're just talking about, hey, we like dinosaurs because they're big.

Speaker 31 So we have big creatures here and in the oceans and all the creatures,

Speaker 31 shouldn't we tend to those first and make sure that we protect them, not put them in zoos, not make money off of them, but just make sure we all, that it works for everybody.

Speaker 24 Yeah, we all get along.

Speaker 31 That would be my moral instinct. I'm no doctor.

Speaker 11 Well, you played one on TV.

Speaker 32 You play one on TV.

Speaker 31 Very nice.

Speaker 20 Very nice.

Speaker 28 Ross, you specialize in this among your multiple specialties that I know of.

Speaker 21 One of them is extinction and de-extinction.

Speaker 24 So tell me how de-extinction would work.

Speaker 19 Very simply, de-extinction is the idea of bringing back species, populations that are no longer with us because they've disappeared. So think woolly mammoths.

Speaker 19 We've been talking about woolly mammoths as a good example. The last of them died out on continents about 10,000 years ago.

Speaker 19 There were remnant populations on islands until about 4,000 years ago, but they're gone. And the question accordingly is, were we responsible? A lot of people think so.

Speaker 19 So do we owe it to woolly mammoths to the degree that we can bring them back to bring them back?

Speaker 42 Because we

Speaker 42 are accountable.

Speaker 21 Whereas we're not accountable for the death of T-Rex, so let them stay. That's right.

Speaker 41 Well, it's not a problem.

Speaker 9 That's right.

Speaker 19 It goes beyond that because ancient DNA, which is the building blocks that you'd have to use for the experiments to bring the animals back, has a life life of no more than a million years.

Speaker 19 So you're not going to go back 66 plus million years and bring back the dinosaurs. That was always the fundamental problem with Jurassic Park.

Speaker 17 Okay, so let's just imagine.

Speaker 22 If we could bring back T-Rex, should we?

Speaker 19 What's it going to do? What's its ecosystem function?

Speaker 44 It's going to eat lawyers. Okay.

Speaker 19 What else is it going to do?

Speaker 19 And the answer is nothing.

Speaker 11 It has no.

Speaker 16 You're right. It'll be in a a zoo.

Speaker 19 It has no... Yes, exactly.
So it's going to be an exhibit like we have here at the American Museum, except everything here is dead and stuffed, which is a difference.

Speaker 28 But you might consider Britain, if we are entirely responsible, our cave troglodyte ancestors are responsible for the extinction of the woolly mammoth.

Speaker 4 You feel some guilt there, I guess.

Speaker 19 Well, that's the ethical question.

Speaker 34 See, I see, I don't think we should bring it back because

Speaker 28 here, woolly mammoth, who were thriving during the ice age, we're going to bring it back just in time for global warming.

Speaker 11 What the hell is that?

Speaker 43 They will be so uncomfortable.

Speaker 38 My God, it's hot.

Speaker 37 What have you done with the place?

Speaker 14 I know. Yeah, right.

Speaker 17 So, Charl, would you bring back animals, Chuck?

Speaker 38 I would bring back animals, but quite frankly,

Speaker 42 I like food.

Speaker 38 And so, as a foodie, I would only bring back those that are delicious.

Speaker 6 Oh, well, how would you know what was delicious?

Speaker 38 I don't know. That is why I have a little game that I would like to show you right now.

Speaker 37 Okay.

Speaker 38 Where Ross will tell me if these animals are delicious.

Speaker 12 Are they tasting delicious? Are they dead?

Speaker 8 Could we bring it back?

Speaker 11 To eat it.

Speaker 37 My first submission would be the Klyptodon.

Speaker 38 All right. First of all, I will tell you.

Speaker 37 Wait, is that a real Ross?

Speaker 45 Is that real?

Speaker 17 Is that real?

Speaker 19 Yes, it is. It's a gigantic armadillo that lived in South America.
Some also lived in North America. Some of them were upwards of 2,000 kilograms.

Speaker 12 So 4,000 pounds. 4,000 pounds?

Speaker 16 A ton.

Speaker 26 Yes, these are big armadillos.

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 26 Right.

Speaker 19 Now, what would it be like for Chuck? I think it would be a lot like eating a tennis racket, frankly.

Speaker 16 Damn it.

Speaker 19 If you just look at the beast, you can see that it's very heavily armored.

Speaker 19 There's bone. um sort of everywhere right like a little tank right and in order to support that mass

Speaker 34 it needs really tough tissue.

Speaker 8 Really tough, yes, and tough to eat.

Speaker 38 So, it's not good, it's not good to eat.

Speaker 11 So, there you go.

Speaker 12 And so, I don't know.

Speaker 11 But, but could we bring it back?

Speaker 19 The last of them died out about 10,000 years ago. It's within reach of ancient DNA.

Speaker 11 So, that's a yes.

Speaker 19 That's a yes as to could we? And then we go, Jeff Goldblum to say should we.

Speaker 38 I don't know, an animal that looks like Epcot Center. I think I want to bring it back.

Speaker 11 That's good.

Speaker 15 All right, here's my next one:

Speaker 38 Metatherium.

Speaker 19 Okay, Megatherium.

Speaker 38 Metatherium.

Speaker 19 This is now getting very serious in body size. This could be upward of 4,000 kilograms.
So we're talking the size of the largest elephants that are around today.

Speaker 50 What I need to say is that this is a sloth.

Speaker 19 You know about tree sloths, right? Those are the only sloths that are still with us. They come in at five kilograms, so 11 pounds.
This guy, a couple of orders of magnitude larger.

Speaker 19 I think more tennis racket more than anything else.

Speaker 38 Once again, not a good, doesn't taste good.

Speaker 26 Well, I don't know.

Speaker 31 Easy to catch is a sloth.

Speaker 14 So can we bring it back?

Speaker 19 It's the same as the glyptodon. Died out 10,000 years ago.
There's ancient DNA. I've worked on its ancient DNA.

Speaker 34 It's there to work on. It's within reach.

Speaker 16 Right on.

Speaker 26 The question boys.

Speaker 38 But don't worry, Megatherium. We're going to take our time bringing you back.

Speaker 40 Here's the last one. Last one.

Speaker 38 And we talked on it. We touched on it.

Speaker 36 Woolly, Woolly.

Speaker 38 Should we, first of all, how would a woolly taste? And I mean, if we were part of its extinction, I can only hope that we were eating it.

Speaker 19 Well, you know, there are stories when these carcasses appear in places like Siberia, as they do from time to time.

Speaker 21 When they emerge from a receding glacier or something?

Speaker 19 Yeah, where they melt out of riverbanks. That's the commonest way.
There are stories of people, and dogs in particular, of having had a steak or two.

Speaker 19 Now, I personally have never done that, nor would I want to. I mean, think about it.
This is something that's been dead 10,000 years. This is the worst road pizza you can imagine.

Speaker 6 Well, my buddy Bill Nye, the science guy,

Speaker 29 has some thoughts on Jurassic Park-style de-extinction.

Speaker 28 Let's check it out.

Speaker 57 We're all fascinated with dinosaurs. That's part of why the movie Jurassic Park was such a hit.
It's a classic and classic science fiction. Now keep in mind that science is not inherently good or bad.

Speaker 57 It's a process. But let's face it, in science fiction movies, we want to see scientists doing something dangerous.
And those scientists are usually evil.

Speaker 57 But what if we could really do that Jurassic Park DNA thing? and bring back an extinct species to de-extinct some extraordinary animal.

Speaker 57 Well, I guarantee you, we'd learn a lot about biology, we'd learn a lot about evolution and ourselves. But is it a good idea?

Speaker 57 What if we accidentally produced a population of vicious predators who would think nothing of biting your head off and chewing you up and spitting you out? Now, that really would be scary.

Speaker 57 Fortunately, that technology is a long way off.

Speaker 28 So, up next, in my interview with Jeff Goldman, we discuss the butterfly effect when Star Talk returns.

Speaker 7 This is Star Talk.

Speaker 54 Welcome back to Star Talk from the American Museum of Natural History right here in New York City.

Speaker 21 We're featuring my interview with actor Jeff Goldblum.

Speaker 28 And I asked about his character in Jurassic Park, where he evokes the concept of chaos theory.

Speaker 45 Let's check it out.

Speaker 34 Did you have to do any homework to justify, as an actor, using the word chaos in a sentence?

Speaker 31 Oh, you know, chaos itself or chaos theory.

Speaker 34 Chaos theory.

Speaker 31 I was talking about in that movie. You know, I did my due diligence.
I'm nothing if not conscientious.

Speaker 31 I'm a good worker. My dad was a

Speaker 31 work ethic person. He was a doctor.

Speaker 31 Yeah, I read that book and whatever else I could get my hands on in the time I had and

Speaker 31 tracked down a couple of pioneering high-class, I was told, practitioners, devotees.

Speaker 16 Because you delivered the line with

Speaker 16 some panache.

Speaker 31 Well,

Speaker 31 I knew enough to pretend like I can't, you know, when you play these parts, you realize, hey, I could never, I'm not a brain surgeon.

Speaker 31 These people have devoted, I'm not an astrophysicist, but I can be curious.

Speaker 31 And I do enough in the time, from the time I get the part, to try to do my best at pretending well, so that I can credibly, you know, say,

Speaker 31 whatever I say.

Speaker 16 I think you pulled it off.

Speaker 28 Well, anyway, in chaos, what I think in modern times, it's been, the word has less currency today than it did, you know, a couple of decades ago, unfortunately, because it's still a force to be reckoned with.

Speaker 30 Is it, is it? In the world.

Speaker 9 Oh, good. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 46 Chaos theory is you can model a system that's very complex.

Speaker 28 You put in the initial conditions and watch it go.

Speaker 33 And it makes a cloud, or in the case of weather, you can make wind patterns.

Speaker 31 And the butterfly effect.

Speaker 25 Yeah, yeah, that's just what it comes down to, right?

Speaker 28 And so then you say, okay, let me change these initial conditions by the tiniest amount

Speaker 4 and see if I can change the result by a little bit.

Speaker 16 So, you change by a tiny amount, you get a completely different result.

Speaker 31 Can you imagine us in our lives when we say, Hey, should I make this decision?

Speaker 32 Should I have that impossible?

Speaker 24 There's emergencies of branch points in our lives.

Speaker 21 So, I guess that's a kind of a chaotic analog.

Speaker 21 You don't know how different your life would be from that one little change.

Speaker 31 If you've been one little

Speaker 8 thing,

Speaker 16 okay, joining us to help make sense of chaos and chaos theory is economist Raphael Chapp.

Speaker 14 Welcome.

Speaker 14 You're a faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and you teach a course called Chaos Theory, Complexity, Emergence, and Chaos.

Speaker 9 Right.

Speaker 13 So how do you explain chaos theory to your students?

Speaker 39 Right. So in ordinary speech, chaos means disorder, lack of rules, lack of order.

Speaker 39 But chaos theory is a bit more subtle, and it gives us a new understanding of dynamical deterministic deterministic systems. Dynamical means you have variables, they change over time.

Speaker 39 Deterministic means if you know everything about the state of the system, the equations at any time, the equations unambiguously tell you what happens next, and only one thing can happen.

Speaker 39 So there's no room for randomness.

Speaker 39 And yet, these systems can sometimes behave in ways that are seem to be appear to be random and unpredictable. Some examples of chaotic motion,

Speaker 39 the drip of water in a faucet, the

Speaker 39 oscillation of a double rod pendulum, the motion of a moon of Saturn called Hyperion. It's a little rock that just moves erratically.

Speaker 39 But also climate, weather.

Speaker 28 So these are very diverse manifestations of chaos theory. in our lives and in the world.

Speaker 11 Indeed.

Speaker 39 You can find it in many places.

Speaker 21 And you teach economics.

Speaker 15 Correct.

Speaker 21 But we don't want to hear that there's chaos in economics. We don't want to know that.

Speaker 11 Please, my 401k is tentative as it is.

Speaker 15 So tell me about the butterfly effect.

Speaker 39 So the sensitivity to initial conditions in popular terms, that's called the butterfly effect. That's really what has captured our imagination.

Speaker 39 And it comes from the title of a paper by a gentleman named Edward Lorenz, who

Speaker 39 presented this paper at a conference in the early 70s. And the title was, Does the Flap of a butterfly wing in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?

Speaker 39 But the idea that's captured here is really the fact that a very seemingly inconsequential event, right? A butterfly with the wing,

Speaker 39 can have a really huge impact in another side of the world. It's very poetic.
That's the butterfly effect.

Speaker 38 Which is why I hate butterflies. Hate them.
They're nothing but tiny little colorful bats.

Speaker 29 So, Ross, does chaos play a role in extinction?

Speaker 16 Could there be some series of events that just go out of control and gone as a species?

Speaker 19 Well, I don't think that it's necessarily as ordered as

Speaker 19 Raffaello was just talking about, but it could be similar in some ways. So let's go back to dinosaur days, since that's what we've been talking about.
About 75%

Speaker 19 of everything living at the time disappeared. But that means 25% survived.

Speaker 21 You're talking about the 65 million years ago.

Speaker 8 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 19 So who is that 25%?

Speaker 19 It's all over the place.

Speaker 19 So, for example, crocodiles survived, whereas a lot of other groups that are reptiles, including everything except birds, disappeared. Now, why should that be the case?

Speaker 19 Why should everything that's sort of on the wrong side of the fence or the wrong side of the railway tracks in the case of dinosaurs have disappeared?

Speaker 19 You had dinosaurs by the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago, that were the size of chickens, as well as the tyrannosaurus. So size is not the issue.

Speaker 19 There was something going on there physiologically, so they didn't make it, the birds did. And there were feathered dinosaurs that were not avian.

Speaker 19 My point is that people like me spend a lot of time trying to sort out logically why these things disappeared.

Speaker 19 And maybe the logic is not there, that these catastrophic effects were so general that in some cases you just had bad luck.

Speaker 19 And in other cases, you made it for similar reasons that you had good luck, but it had nothing to do with anything else.

Speaker 38 I'm sure the dinosaurs are very happy to hear that right now.

Speaker 36 Well, there's nothing.

Speaker 38 Sorry, guys, you just have bad luck.

Speaker 14 So, Raphael, people generally think of chaos as something bad.

Speaker 21 Like you said earlier, we want to avoid chaos in our daily lives.

Speaker 23 But is there a way to think of chaos as something good?

Speaker 39 I think the reason that chaos is bad, we tend to think of that as something bad, is because order gives us a sense of security and safety.

Speaker 39 And there's an old philosophical idea of chaos. And for the Greeks, it was this state of the world before creation.
So it was a real placeholder for the mystery of the universe.

Speaker 39 Everything that makes us uncomfortable, we put that label on it. In terms of our daily lives,

Speaker 39 chaos is everywhere in simple systems.

Speaker 39 It doesn't have to be a lot of variables.

Speaker 39 And

Speaker 39 it can also

Speaker 39 be found everywhere. So you turn on your faucet in your bathroom, the water, that's chaotic.
In your bathtub, it's chaotic. In your kitchen, you whisk some egg whites, that's chaotic.

Speaker 39 You take some dough, you fold it and stretch it, that's chaotic. Your brain, your brain waves.

Speaker 16 Don't believe me.

Speaker 8 I'm so with you.

Speaker 39 Your heart rate. If it becomes chaotic, you're in trouble.

Speaker 31 You have a heart attack.

Speaker 21 Okay, so what you're saying is we are living with chaos on the assumption that it's bad, but in fact, it's a fundamental dimension of life itself.

Speaker 39 Well, there's the question of the implication of the butterfly effect in our daily lives, in our decisions.

Speaker 27 Going forward, yeah.

Speaker 39 You know, one interpretation could be if the long-term consequences can be predicted, it doesn't really matter what I do. So like, I can do whatever.
Or you could think about it in terms of,

Speaker 39 well, seemingly inconsequential things that I do in ordinary life can actually change the world, right? They can matter a great deal. They can be that bifurcation of the world into a different future.

Speaker 39 So that puts a lot of pressure on us, right? It can be nerve-wracking and maybe paralyzing.

Speaker 20 It's a pressure.

Speaker 4 It's a pressure that you ought to be able to confront in life.

Speaker 21 Otherwise, you're a victim of your future rather than a master of it.

Speaker 18 Right.

Speaker 21 Well, Raphael, thank you for joining us on Star Talk.

Speaker 43 Thank you so much.

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Speaker 31 We must learn how to resolve differences non-violently.

Speaker 31 And even though the universe may be a violent place and a hostile place, we shouldn't, like Independence Day, figure out how to arm ourselves and survive against the hostile universe.

Speaker 31 We should revolve as a species, as a peaceful species.

Speaker 21 However, what will happen before the Martians come?

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 21 Let me double check when the Martians are coming.

Speaker 33 What will happen before the Martians come is that an asteroid will come.

Speaker 24 Right.

Speaker 21 And we will need the power, the wisdom, the energy, the financing to deflect the asteroid, lest we go extinct.

Speaker 28 as did the dinosaurs.

Speaker 19 So that's my question.

Speaker 28 So when they're developing the bomb,

Speaker 31 maybe they didn't think about it then, but there is a use. You think you could, are you saying that with a nuclear weapon, you could...

Speaker 23 there are multiple ways you can

Speaker 21 if you want to destroy the thing in space, yes, a nuclear weapon is our best understanding of how to do that. But if you want to have it not hit us, you don't need to destroy it, you just deflect it.

Speaker 31 Okay, with but with new this technology, no, there's there's kindler, gentler ways too.

Speaker 17 You just sort of shove it a little, amazing, it doesn't take much, and if you do it early enough, that gentle push can completely miss Earth.

Speaker 33 So interesting

Speaker 13 joining us to discuss defending Earth from asteroids is planetary astronomer Kelly Fass. Kelly, welcome.

Speaker 15 Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 14 You're a program manager in the Planetary Defense Coordination Office at NASA headquarters.

Speaker 28 That sounds really badass.

Speaker 8 Protecting Earth.

Speaker 38 Somebody's got to do it.

Speaker 34 It's a tough job.

Speaker 52 But somebody's got to do it.

Speaker 38 Somebody's got to do it.

Speaker 28 So what is NASA doing to defend the planet?

Speaker 16 And against what?

Speaker 17 Against asteroids or anything else?

Speaker 52 Well, against near-Earth asteroids, the one that end up in our neighborhood. Like you mentioned, you want to do something early.

Speaker 52 And so the first step in doing that is to find them before they find us.

Speaker 52 And so NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office supports efforts that survey the skies, looking for near-Earth asteroids, cataloging them, but also calculating their orbits to figure out where they're going to be in the future.

Speaker 52 As you know, two bodies in the same space at the same time is not good.

Speaker 8 That's bad.

Speaker 52 And then also looking at mitigation possibilities, should it become necessary to get them before they get out?

Speaker 28 You sound confident because like, okay, but we have funding to detect them, but not funding to deflect them, correct?

Speaker 52 Well, it's actually there are studies.

Speaker 52 That's a no.

Speaker 18 That's a no? No,

Speaker 12 that's very, very nice of no.

Speaker 52 No, that's not. Actually, the DART mission is a NASA mission in development.
DART. DART.
It stands for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

Speaker 52 And it is in development to demonstrate a mitigation technique so that should it become necessary to do it one of these days, we'll at least have looked at how that technique performs.

Speaker 52 And in this case, it would be the kinetic impact technique.

Speaker 52 I mean, you had mentioned, you know, if you could do this early, if you find them and you know well ahead of time, you don't have to deflect it a whole lot in order for it to miss Earth in the future.

Speaker 52 and so how likely are we to detect it an at a bad asteroid early enough well that's the thing the um the larger near-earth asteroids uh one kilometer and larger in size the ones that would have uh global consequences right the the nice thing is they're they're the low-hanging fruit there are fewer of them they're larger they're easier to find and probably we have a better handle on that population but it's the for once it's worked in our favor right right yeah the the big bad ones are easy to detect, yeah.

Speaker 52 But as you get smaller and smaller, there are more and more of them, and it's harder and harder to find them.

Speaker 52 And so when you're talking about a size range now that 140 meters and larger, I would say, that could have regional impact should it hit Earth.

Speaker 52 That population is estimated to be more like 25,000.

Speaker 52 And after 20 years of surveying the skies, even though capabilities have gotten better with telescopes and doing this from the ground, there still are about two-thirds of that population left to be found.

Speaker 52 And so that's the thing, you know, being concerned about what we have yet to find, so that at least there are some things in the toolbox, you know, should this become an issue.

Speaker 15 Rush, you study extinction.

Speaker 28 And so of the, are there five, there have been multiple extinction episodes, but five major ones, if I, with my case? The big mass extinction.

Speaker 14 The big mass extinction, how many of those

Speaker 28 implicate asteroids as a source?

Speaker 19 Well, it's interesting. When it was first first proposed with evidence in the early 1980s, people started thinking, okay, it wasn't just the dinosaurs.
It was the same sort of thing again and again.

Speaker 19 You'd have these extraterrestrial visitors that blew the place up.

Speaker 21 But then... You don't mean aliens, you mean asteroids.

Speaker 41 In this case. Yes.

Speaker 19 But it didn't work out that way. So you have two problems.
You've got big extinctions without any correlated or obvious impact or anywhere.

Speaker 19 And you've also got impactors, some of which must have been very large in size, that didn't do anything.

Speaker 21 Well, you have a smoking gun with no damage.

Speaker 9 Yeah. Yeah, so that's awkward.

Speaker 19 That's very awkward. So now the thinking is going to

Speaker 19 Earth processes, particularly the release of tremendous amounts of lava, tremendous amounts of magnetic

Speaker 19 super volcanoes, along with all the noxious gases. So you get widespread poisoning of both the air and the sea.
And that that's the thing that has driven at least under.

Speaker 16 Earth's trying to kill us

Speaker 21 well nasa can't help that

Speaker 25 well independence day it was aliens that were coming to destroy the earth and jeff goblin and i discussed the idea of contacting aliens that could be hostile so let's check it out

Speaker 11 you don't give strangers in the street your email address much less the return address to earth to aliens yeah but wait a minute no no there's no there's no but wait a minute to that sentence well that's a totally good sentence that requires no modification.

Speaker 31 Well, but sir, but doctor, let me see.

Speaker 31 Yes, that's what we do, and I wouldn't, I agree.

Speaker 20 I wouldn't. Did you don't do that?

Speaker 16 Your own species.

Speaker 31 I'm not going to tell him my identity.

Speaker 56 Your own species. That's true.

Speaker 8 Okay.

Speaker 31 But we're a funny species, and that's interspecies.

Speaker 31 I don't know, especially

Speaker 31 the aspiration to make contact is human. Yes, can't we forego that paranoia, which may not, which we know on earth between ourselves is justified.

Speaker 4 Well, it's justified because there's someone who you don't know who could do harm to you.

Speaker 31 Yeah, but if they wanted to do harm, they could do so much harm that we can't do what we did in Independence Day. There's no, I would not build up our nuclear forces because who knows what.

Speaker 31 So I would not use it as a reason to weaponize and to further, you know,

Speaker 31 fund our weaponry. No.

Speaker 31 I think we have to err on the side of, hey, here we are. I don't know.
What do you think? I mean, you're an expert.

Speaker 31 I would say, if I was going to make the, it was up to me, I'd say, yeah, here we are. Here we are.
Here's our address. Here's everything about us.
You know, here's all our diseases.

Speaker 31 Here's my medical records. Here's my tax records.
Whatever you want to know.

Speaker 18 Kelly.

Speaker 28 Kelly, what does NASA's Planetary Defense think about the several occasions and surely more to come where we beam the return address of Earth out into space with the attempt to contact possibly hostile aliens.

Speaker 4 And we know the hostile because every movie except Spielberg's E.T.

Speaker 28 has them sucking our brains out.

Speaker 52 Well, that's what I was going to say. I've seen Independence Day and I've seen enough science fiction movies to know that it's a really bad idea.

Speaker 15 Well, you agree it's a bad idea.

Speaker 52 I agree it's a bad idea, but at least as far as NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office is concerned, we're concerned about the asteroids, about the hard stuff, and not about the squishy stuff with tentacles.

Speaker 52 That's somebody else's job.

Speaker 21 Well, up next in my interview with Jeff Goeblum, we discuss cultivating a curious mind.

Speaker 8 And Jeff expressed deep passion and interest in science and learning in our conversation.

Speaker 34 And I asked him where that curiosity began.

Speaker 7 Check it out.

Speaker 21 As an academic and as a scientist, I deeply respect curious minds.

Speaker 56 Where does that come from?

Speaker 31 Where does it come from? I'd be remiss if I, well, when I'm with somebody like you, who would I be? Shame on me if I didn't start to bubble with a little curiosity. You're a fountain.

Speaker 31 When you're right near the fountain, don't you get a little thirsty?

Speaker 56 Fountain of curiosity.

Speaker 31 Well, there you go. So my curiosity, well, I think it's in us if we don't snip it off and

Speaker 31 undermine it and sabotage it.

Speaker 28 So it just never left you?

Speaker 31 Something like that. Yes, I see my kids.
I got a three-year-old and a one-year-old, two boys.

Speaker 11 Whoa.

Speaker 31 Well,

Speaker 31 it must be in us.

Speaker 31 They're not so special, I don't think.

Speaker 56 But boy, they go from one.

Speaker 8 Right.

Speaker 16 And until they're three,

Speaker 35 half their curiosity would kill them so it's up to you to prevent them from checking out the edge of the cliff that's our main job

Speaker 28 it's a night it's a very yeah yeah and then when they're five six seven then they can be on their own with reduced risk of them having the curiosity kill themselves many parents over constrain their curiosity yeah

Speaker 31 overconstrain their curiosity for fear for safety reasons for safety yeah they think oh yeah even something that we're just or

Speaker 33 for they don't want to break something when oh the child is playing with a plate.

Speaker 23 Oh, don't touch that. You might break it.
Maybe there's something to be learned if it breaks.

Speaker 28 It makes a sound.

Speaker 21 Something is hard, but then it's in a million pieces.

Speaker 23 The pieces can cut you.

Speaker 24 There's knowledge there.

Speaker 31 Somebody told me that we think

Speaker 31 we adhere to this thing called Rye-R-I-E,

Speaker 31 which is, yes, don't you teach them.

Speaker 31 They're doing physics. They're doing something.
Let them do it. They're doing something you don't even understand.

Speaker 56 Or free-range children. All of that.

Speaker 31 Yes. But after that, why do I show them so that they can really, well, I would show them.
What I would show them is the entire series of cosmos.

Speaker 31 I would show them you before I showed them any other so-called wisdom literature or other, I'd say, this is where you are.

Speaker 31 This is who you are, and this is what we know about our place in the universe.

Speaker 16 Yes.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 28 So Ross, we have a mildly privileged position being...

Speaker 24 experts in two fields that are intensely fascinating to children, dinosaurs and space.

Speaker 11 So why do you think that is?

Speaker 26 Big?

Speaker 41 Okay, big is good.

Speaker 11 I saw that movie.

Speaker 44 That's why people love elephants and don't love rats.

Speaker 19 I do, of course.

Speaker 21 Part of me thinks that kids like our respective fields because they respect anything that can eat them.

Speaker 28 So their favorite dinosaur is going to be T-Rex and their favorite cosmic object is going to be a black hole.

Speaker 8 Both of them will eat you.

Speaker 19 It's a very depressing view, but I get it.

Speaker 28 Kelly, you have any thoughts on that?

Speaker 52 Certainly, there's always this curiosity about something, someplace that we want to go. And so space, it's obvious, especially since you can see so much.

Speaker 8 You just go outside. Anybody just go outside.

Speaker 52 So you can't help but just want to go to a place that you can see.

Speaker 25 So would you agree that kids

Speaker 34 who don't lose their curiosity as adults

Speaker 33 are scientists?

Speaker 21 Or rather, that scientists are kids who never lost their curiosity.

Speaker 52 Oh, they're certainly kids.

Speaker 8 Absolutely have a lost their curiosity.

Speaker 19 Yeah, I feel like I'm a superannuated kid all the time because I work in a place like

Speaker 38 I was going to say, I ain't never heard a kid use the word annuated.

Speaker 37 Mother, mother, I'm feeling quite annuated right now.

Speaker 16 Stick with me, I'll improve your performance.

Speaker 19 No, but you and I do have privileged positions because we work in a place here that is absolutely devoted to understanding the most complicated, the most interesting, the most diverse kinds of phenomena that people have ever dealt with.

Speaker 19 And that is a beautiful place to be in if you have that kind of attitude where everything is novel, everything is interesting.

Speaker 28 Well, Jeff Goldblum, to my surprise, brought a copy of one of my books to the interview.

Speaker 25 The book he brought was Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

Speaker 30 Yes.

Speaker 21 And so he asked about my inspiration for writing it.

Speaker 43 Check it out.

Speaker 24 It's everything

Speaker 21 spiritually and intellectually mind-blowing in the universe that I've collected into that moment.

Speaker 32 Yes. And I love your, and because I've heard you on other

Speaker 31 times besides what I think you touch on in this, do we need, in order to be creative, inspired, spiritual, feel grateful,

Speaker 31 feel uplifted, ennobled, connected with each other, poetical, musical, Need we go any farther than

Speaker 31 the facts that have here that have already been uncovered by you and your friends, by science, and what's going on

Speaker 31 around us? No, of course not. We don't need to make up things or believe in things that are just fun to believe in just because we're lazy and we don't want to kind of investigate a little bit.

Speaker 28 I agree with everything you just said, and I can

Speaker 33 neither add nor subtract from it.

Speaker 9 I love you.

Speaker 28 Just some parting thoughts on our show today.

Speaker 6 Dinosaurs were around for hundreds of millions of years in some form or another

Speaker 14 until

Speaker 21 All the ones we celebrate, especially the ones with big teeth, all went extinct 65 million years ago.

Speaker 15 So in fact, they were around for longer before they went extinct than the time that has elapsed since they went extinct.

Speaker 29 So

Speaker 8 if

Speaker 13 they didn't go extinct 65 million years ago, there's no reason to think they wouldn't still be here today.

Speaker 9 But what happened?

Speaker 6 We fear asteroids, yes, but an asteroid takes out the dinosaurs, pries open an ecological niche, enabling our mammal ancestors to evolve into something somewhat more ambitious

Speaker 11 than the rodents that they were at the time.

Speaker 16 So I think about it. Wow.

Speaker 28 Can asteroids be all that bad?

Speaker 20 Can extinction be all that bad?

Speaker 21 We have the technology, we have the intelligence to avoid that fate.

Speaker 30 We can do better than the hand that nature deals us.

Speaker 34 We can deflect an asteroid.

Speaker 56 We can develop a viral serum.

Speaker 5 We can

Speaker 16 be good caretakers

Speaker 8 of the earth

Speaker 21 that we are borrowing from our descendants.

Speaker 21 Until that day comes,

Speaker 30 our extinction is inevitable.