Cosmic Queries – Dark Matter, Aliens, End of the Universe

Hey, you wondering how you can invest in yourself and work towards a goal that will last?

Rosetta Stone makes it easy to turn a few minutes a day into real language progress.

You've heard me talk about Rosetta Stone in the past, and you know that I love the anytime, anywhere bite-sized lessons that allow me to go ahead and continue to learn Spanish so that I can know exactly what my mother-in-law is saying about me.

Maybe you're gearing up for a trip to another country, or maybe you're going to reconnect with family roots.

Or maybe you just want to impress people with the fact that, yeah, you know another language.

Well, now Star Talk Radio listeners can grab Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off.

Visit RosettaStone.com slash StarTalk to get started and claim your 50% off today.

Jas la order, mi amigos.

Rosettastone.com slash star talk.

You ever walked around a neighborhood and wish you could see inside somewhere that was available for rent?

Well, let me just give you a tip.

Don't climb up on the ledge and look in the window.

People will call the cops.

Well, maybe you've walked past a place for rent and you wished you could peek inside.

Maybe even explore the layout, envision the natural light streaming through the windows, or plan where your vinyl record collection would go.

Well, at apartments.com, you can.

With tools like their 3D virtual tours, you can see the exact unit you could be living in at all from the comfort of your couch.

And if you end up wanting to see it in person, you can book a tour online without having to speak to a leasing rep.

Really envision yourself in your new home with apartments.com.

The place to find a place.

Hey, Star Talkians, Neil here.

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

Check it out.

Welcome to Star Talk,

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

Star Talk begins right now.

This is Star Talk.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.

Got with me my co-host, Check.

Nice.

Hey, hey, hey, Neil.

What's happening?

All right.

I love having you out there, Chuck.

I love being here.

For all my Star Talk needs, you're there.

And beyond.

And beyond.

And beyond, my friend.

We're going to knock knock out another Cosmic Queries, but this one, we have to grab the ones that don't fit any categories.

So, this is just, I think you coined the term galactic gumbo.

I do.

That's my favorite.

We call it grab bag.

We'll call it a bunch of different things.

But my favorite is the Lactic Gumbo.

You don't know Garo.

You'll put on there the little Cayon pepper.

Spice that up.

Spice your little cayon

Come and cay on pepper.

That's why.

So we should go to Louisiana and see if we can get Galactic Gumbo on somebody's menu.

Oh, wow.

That's oh, that's a great idea.

I mean, why not?

Who's going to say no to that, right?

Exactly.

Yo, that's a great idea.

Oh, nothing would make me more happy than to go into a place.

Great to everything.

Yeah,

galactic gumbo.

So these are all Patreon questions.

And, you know, they're getting it good.

It's ask anything.

Okay, okay.

So, like, all right.

And if I don't know, I'll just say, I don't know, go on to the next question.

That's right.

So, it could be anything that they want to know from you, you know?

So,

including, you know, why is the sky blue?

But we already did that.

We already did that.

We got that.

Yeah, we did.

And, you know, the more content we post, Chuck, right?

And explainer videos and things,

the whole Cosmic Queries could just be go to this link.

We just kicked that.

Right.

When we're done explaining everything, then we got it.

Okay, so give it to.

Oh, by the way, I have to, I'm compelled that this format inspired a book, a Star Talk book called Cosmic Queries.

It's

March 2021.

And is it actual queries from people?

No, so what happens is there's some queries that are just so deep and they spill out over this format.

Someone says, what is the meaning of our existence or why is the universe here?

Those are real questions that real people have, but they don't lend themselves to our reparte, right?

So we collected the deepest questions ever asked, and we put them in the Cosmic Queries book.

So it's like, how did life get here?

What is the universe made of?

Why can't I wear brown shoes with a black tuxedo?

Or can I wear white after Labor Day?

Those are the questions.

Right.

Cool, man.

So start it out.

What you got?

All right.

Bring it on.

Let's go with

Umran Coca.

Umran Coca.

But

it says, Chuck, if you're reading this, please just call me Sarah.

Okay.

Well, there you have it.

Sarah.

Thank you, Sarah.

Thanks, Sarah.

Thanks for telling me after you make a fool of yourself.

Right, you could have just put that as your name.

All right.

Could dark matter be

the effect of another universe's gravity on our own gravity?

That's what I want it to be.

I so badly want dark matter to be regular matter in a parallel universe whose gravitational force is spilling into our space-time.

I want that to be true, but none of my colleagues are leaning that way and they're like deep in it and it's their expertise.

And I'm just looking over the fence.

What you up to today?

Picking it up so I can share it with all you good people.

So the, the, the, the, what's the over, under, the odds on favorite is that there's some other kind of particle, family of particles that are not the electron, proton, neutron, the ones we're familiar with, that do not interact with our particles.

And if they don't interact, in any sort of chemical way, then light will pass through them.

You know, they, all you'll feel is their gravity.

And so

I don't have a problem with that.

I just don't think it's as fun as thinking there could be another universe.

Now,

the only reason why I think this is I spoke with some top folks

about

field theory.

This is a class I never took in graduate school, and I regret it, but field theory, you study, you know, fields.

These are fields that

generate forces on objects, basically.

Okay.

Turns out.

Not the kind you play on.

Not the kind you play on.

Okay, all right.

These are force fields.

A concept introduced by,

who's our guy at the mid-century?

Mid-century, a Faraday, Michael Faraday, in the mid-19th century, because no one imagined describing something you can't see that has an effect on other things.

All right.

And so he had to invent this concept, this field concept, where you draw lines that take the shape of that field.

and that's what the iron filings do for the magnetic field right right yeah before him it was just oh the the the they're just that's just what they do right but he he gave it logic

so he gave it so he anchored it in in physics speaks so that we can actually calculate with them and do other things sweet so so these are fields so in field theory you apparently and i i can't demonstrate this to you.

I can only repeat it.

Others have told me that light and all the forces forces that surround it, electromagnetic forces, cannot exit your space-time.

They're trapped within it, but gravity can.

Gravity can spill out of your universe and move between universes.

That's what I heard.

And I think I got that right.

Okay.

But I, so if that's the case, then a nearby universe in this higher dimensional

construct could have gravity spilling into our universe.

And there we are mystically touching it thinking it's a magical invisible thing when it's just real and it's just something sitting on outside the door wow so now let me just ask this uh on top of what she's

you talked about what sarah what sarah says thank you sarah sarah sarah um

So you say that some think it would, that they might want it to be these particles that we cannot interact with.

Yeah, it's not so much that they, I think there's good reason to think they could be those particles.

And there are experiments now designed to try to capture them and see if one in a zillion encounters with our particles, maybe they'll have some,

there'll be some exception to that rule that'll render them visible.

Gotcha.

Because that's my point.

It's like, what,

why

make that postulate in the first place?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, what, you know, why not just little gremlins?

You know, I mean,

there's an invisible particle you can't see.

Right.

You know, so, all right.

No, no, so you have theories guiding these experiments, and they're suggesting if the dark matter is of this kind,

it should interact with this regular particle in this way, this

rarely, or at least frequently.

And so you do this.

So we have these huge experiments trying to detect dark matter particles.

Okay, cool.

That's all that's going on there.

All right.

So I'm with Sarah on this.

It'd be cool if it were.

Okay, very cool.

that is by the way if that's the case yes since we have five times as much dark matter in our universe as regular matter matter right that means there's a ton of regular matter in this other universe right their regular matter right yeah if our dark matter is their regular matter that universe has at least six at least six times the mass of our at least it turns out to escape your universe and enter another one the strength of the gravity drops off precipitously so it has to be even stronger than just a factor of six.

Wow.

So it's a honkering universe.

And wouldn't it be weird if one day we learned we're just some small gnat on the, among other gnats, on the back of a much larger, more powerful universe.

And we're just a satellite universe to it.

Wow.

That's in a way very humbling.

Very humbling.

And in a way, I kind of want us all to get together and just make a very loud sound so that we're not boiled in a pot of

water as the dus spec that we are.

Or to get swatted off the battle.

Bang.

Right.

Wow.

Okay, cool.

All right.

Okay, here we go.

This is

also from Patreon.

Sarah was a Patreon patron.

And for those of you interested, go to patreon.com/slash star talkradio and support us.

And then, you know, you can be part of actual private Patreon Cosmic Queries, where Neil answers your questions almost personally.

So there you go.

Yeah, yeah, these would just only be posted behind the

curtain.

Behind the curtain, yeah, Patreon curtain.

All right, Fernando Gomes says this.

Our Gomes or Gomez?

You know, it's G-O-M-E-S, so maybe it's Gomez, but it's, I, it's just if it's for if it's Freddie,

then fine, but it was Fernando.

Give me some.

Okay.

All right.

Let me.

I'm sorry.

Let me.

Allow me me to recalibrate.

Here we go.

This is from Fernando Gomez.

Now starring.

Fernando Gomez.

Right.

No, maybe Gomez needs a Z and Gomez is F.

Maybe.

I don't know.

Okay.

Go on.

Anyway, he says, our own pocket of the universe is expanding.

Will it exceed the speed of light?

I guess when he's saying expanding, he's also including the acceleration as well.

And if so, will that mean

we'll no more be able to detect anything coming from outside of our universe too?

First of all, that is already the case.

Okay.

Snap.

Okay.

And as time moves on, and as you correctly added, Chuck, with the acceleration of the universe, what will happen is things that used to be within our horizon simply expand faster than the light that they're sending us can reach us, and then they basically disappear beyond the horizon.

And as the universe continues to expand, things that used to be nearby will now find themselves on this extreme limit of the expansion and then disappear beyond the horizon, such that there will be a day that arrives.

By the way, there's a whole section of one of the chapters in the Cosmic Query book on this.

By the way, it's not out yet.

It's like March, so don't worry about it yet.

Not out yet.

So I don't even think it's listed yet.

So I shouldn't even be talking about the book.

So pretend I

didn't say anything.

Hey, you're getting a sneak peek.

Don't worry.

Okay.

So

there comes a time when

our galaxy will merge with the Andromeda Galaxy at becoming one, one galaxy twice the size, and it will become only us

in our pocket of the universe.

And all other galaxies would have receded beyond our horizon.

And the night sky, as seen from Earth, would contain only stars and nothing else in the universe.

So we would have a universe that people thought it was before Hubble discovered other galaxies.

There was a time, what is, ask anybody before 1926.

they say, tell me about the universe.

Well, they're just stars,

stars in the night sky, and stars just go on like forever.

And then we learned all the stars you see are in our one little galaxy.

And there are other island universes, if you will, which was a term

traceable to Immanuel Kant and others back in the 18th century.

Could there be island universes out there?

So other galaxies, you can think of them that way.

And so everything we know about the history and origin of the universe is because we can see these other galaxies out to the edge of the universe.

But in the distant future, when they all recede beyond our horizon, gone is any record of the history of the universe, the Big Bang, the expansion, everything.

There'll be no indicators left to tell us.

It'll be an entire chapter of the history of the universe ripped from the book.

Oh.

And there you are, any post-apocalyptic civilizations will say, yeah, the universe is just the stars in the night sky.

And they won't have any way to disprove that.

And Chuck, I'd lose sleep wondering whether we today are in some kind of state of existence where a chapter had been removed from our attempt to probe.

our place in the universe.

And here we are without that chapter trying to make sense of it.

Oh, that is

terrible.

Terrible.

What a terrible, terrible thought.

I have these thoughts and it delays slumber.

That is

that's just awful.

That's an awful thought.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

And so is the distant future thought.

That's not good either.

Right.

Yeah.

I got another one.

You ready?

Suppose you grew up on Venus.

You'd be vaporized, but let's ignore that complication.

Okay, right.

If you grew up on Venus, I got some really good sunscreen.

That won't help you from high temperatures.

This is true.

That's only you, Venus.

Sunscreen ain't stopping you from.

Right.

That's not 900 degree.

That's not a, yeah.

I got an asbestos bathing suit.

Go ahead.

So

if civilization arose on Venus,

there would be no culture of the night sky.

There would be no night sky because it has such a thick cloud cover, no one has ever seen the night sky.

Oh, wow.

All you would know is that half a year, because Venus rotates very slowly, half a year, it's just kind of light and then it gets dark for most of the year.

And then it gets, that's all you're going to know.

And so someone would have to figure out how to travel in space to even know there's such a thing as traveling in space.

Right.

Build a spaceship and then imagine emerging from those clouds, the cloud tops for the first time.

And you see the sun and stars and other planets.

Oh my gosh.

So are we buried under some cloak preventing us from getting an accurate understanding of the world around us?

Wow.

That's that's uh that that's very um

very profound and and thought-provoking.

And yeah, that's Fernando.

There you go, Fernando.

Look at look at you, buddy.

The best business-to-business marketing gets wasted on the wrong people.

Think of the guy on the third floor of a 10-storey apartment block who's getting bombarded with ads for solar panels.

What a waste!

So, when you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads.

LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision-makers, and that's where it stands apart from other ad buyers.

You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company, role, seniority, skills, company revenue.

So you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.

It's why LinkedIn Ads generates the highest business-to-business revenue on ad spend of all online ad networks.

Seriously, all of them.

Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one.

No strings attached.

Just go to linkedin.com slash StarTalk.

That's linkedin.com slash Star Talk.

Terms and conditions apply.

Huge savings on Dell AI PCs are here and it's a big deal.

Why?

Because Dell AI PCs with Intel Core Ultra processors are newly designed to help you do more faster.

It's pretty amazing what they can do in a day's work.

They can generate code, edit images, multitask multitask without lag, draft emails, summarize documents, create live translations.

They can even extend your battery life so you never have to worry about forgetting your charger.

It's like having a personal assistant built right into your PC to cover the menial tasks so you can focus on what matters.

That's the power of Dell AI with Intel Inside.

With deals on Dell AI PCs like the Dell 16 Plus starting at $749.99, it's the perfect time to refresh your tech and take back your time.

Upgrade your AIPC today by visiting dell.com/slash deals.

That's dell.com/slash deals.

I'm going to put you on, nephew.

Hi, Don.

Welcome to McDonald's.

Can I take your order?

Miss, I've been hitting up McDonald's for years.

Now it's back.

We need snack wraps.

What's a snack rap?

It's the return of something great.

Snackrap is back.

Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio.

I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to Star Talk every night and support Star Talk on Patreon.

This is Star Talk with Neo deGrasse Tyson.

So just for those only listening, I have two works of art from an Inuit artist.

Yes.

And it is a a bird that has just consumed a a fish and one is a black and white version the other one is a white and black version of the same print and they flank my

desk yes for these recordings and they they look they do look a little alien yeah they do they look

a little alien but they're cool yeah and if you're interested in these you can find them on on the on our postings uh the name of the artist and the and a little bit of the history of the inuit culture is there So,

and I thank her for giving me permission to show these.

I mean, they're actually our real art.

My wife is from, was raised in Alaska.

That's right, yeah.

So, she has sort of an awareness and a sensitivity to the whole region and Inuit art and this sort of thing.

So, that's cool.

Yeah,

let's keep going.

Give me some questions.

Yeah, let's get back into

another Patreon, another Patreon from Jet Thomas.

What a good name.

He's a space hero.

Hello, Neil and Chuck.

If gravitational waves can bend the fabric of space-time,

by the way, jets don't work in space, just so you know.

You need rockets, but go on.

Okay, you're right.

Because you need an air inflow.

You need air inflow to make a jet.

I'm just saying.

I got you.

I got you.

Listen,

I will take that correction.

I'm going to be all up in your face about that.

No, I know.

Listen.

Let stuff go by.

I know who I'm talking around.

Okay.

Okay.

That's why I don't go to the movies with you.

All right, here we go.

So Jet Thomas says this.

If gravitational waves can bend the fabric of space-time, could it potentially be utilized to communicate with life in other universes?

In principle, could a device use gravitational waves instead of the way we use radio waves to stream information outside the bounds of our universe.

Now, you just said in our previous answer that light

is bound to this universe, trapped.

So now gravitational waves.

Yeah, so each one of these is an entire window to the universe.

I mean,

let's think back for a minute.

When the telescope was sort of pioneered by Galileo, he's thinking, oh my gosh, look what I can now see.

And I can look at, I can see ships farther in the distance.

I can look up at the Milky Way and I see stars where you thought it was just a cloud.

And he's imagining that the telescope is the way to see everything your eyes can't.

Okay?

Right.

But then,

give me a couple hundred years on that.

And then what happens?

William Herschel discovers infrared,

which is also light, but your eyes can't see it.

And in fact, in his original research paper, he called it light unfit for vision.

Wow.

And so, wait a minute, if all your telescopes are only giving you visible light, but why even call it visible light?

It's just light, right?

You don't have any other,

there's no reason to qualify that it's visible light if you don't know any of the light that you can't see.

The moment we discover light you can't see, you now have to constrain how you call the light your eyes detect.

And we call that visible light.

Infrared is not visible, ultraviolet is not visible, neither are X-rays, gamma rays, radio waves, none of that.

Yet it's all light traveling at the speed of light.

So we open up telescopes to these windows to the universe.

And that's how we discovered the birth of the universe, and black holes, and

jets, and all kinds of things in the universe.

That's how we discovered them.

But now we can go a step beyond that and say, All of these collectively, in a way, is just one kind of window to the universe.

The window that that uses light.

Are there other kinds of windows?

And yes, gravitational waves is a kind of window.

Neutrinos is a kind of window.

There are neutrinos everywhere.

We just need special telescopes to detect them.

And so if gravity can escape your universe, if that can happen, then there's no reason why we can't send a signal.

I agree entirely.

That's a long answer to just say, yes.

I agree.

But I got a question that, again,

I'm an idiot when it comes to field theory.

So if the ripple of a gravitational wave requires

or its

effect in the space-time continuum is this wave, when it leaves the universe, what is it jiggling?

I mean, I don't know what is it, maybe it's just the graviton, the quantum particle.

that corresponds to the gravity wave in the same way a photon of light light corresponds to the wave of light.

These are sort of parallel constructs.

We speak of light waves, they're carried by photons.

Gravity waves carried by gravitons.

Maybe the graviton busts out, goes through,

enters the other universe, and we don't have to worry about the wave warping the fabric of space and time.

So, yeah, I don't see why not.

But I would need higher expertise to answer that with some precision.

Wow, that, well, God, how much higher expertise can you give?

Jesus.

Brian Green.

Brian Green would totally

be on it.

That is his experience.

He's just up the street.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's his thing.

That's right.

Yeah.

That was a great answer, though, man.

No, that's, that's fantastic.

Yeah.

I love it.

And the windows to the universe, that's an excellent.

Yeah.

So what it is, it's a window.

So the electromagnetic spectrum is a window of windows.

Right.

Right.

And then we have another kind of window over here on the other side of the house.

See, oh, man, I love that.

I love that.

That's just, God, God, that's so.

If you went back in time and said, Galileo, you're practically blind.

Right.

And he's saying, no, I'm not.

Look what I can see.

He was like, do you not see what I'm looking through?

The hell is wrong with you?

Yeah.

That's exactly how he would have said it, too.

You know, that's how he,

dude.

What?

What?

He was colloquial, by the way.

He hung with the common folk.

Oh, really?

So he might have spoken in

Italian vernacular today, whatever that would have been.

Yes, the Italian equivalent of child please.

So, okay, cool.

Child, please.

Don't you know I invented the telescope?

The hell is it?

Straight from the inner cities

of the 20th century.

Child please.

Oh, that's hilarious.

Okay, here we go.

Here we go.

I love that the window, the different windows of the universe.

Love it.

Okay, let's go to Eric Allen Eric Allen.

Hi there.

I've been listening for years, and I finally have the nerve to ask a question.

And who asked this?

Eric Allen.

Eric Allen, three years.

Yes, yes.

So thank you for listening, Eric.

Here we go.

He says, we know that the force of gravity bleeding into our universe from another universe would drop off at the rate of one over R cubed.

He says, yeah.

Okay.

Hypothetically, if the other three forces were somehow able to bleed into our universe

from another, would they be affected the same way?

Now, I don't know if I said his equation correctly.

But I got it.

No, we're good.

We good here.

Are we okay?

So let me just say what's going on here.

Yes.

Okay.

Please.

Okay.

If I have a water pistol.

Okay.

And I shoot it right at your face.

Right.

Then all the water that exited

the vessel in the water pistol goes in a stream and it all lands on your nose.

Right.

Okay.

If you're a good shot.

There's no dilution of, as long as the stream is tight and narrow.

There's no dilution of it, like what came out of my water gun before it hits your face.

Gotcha.

Okay.

So now, let me say, I'm now, instead of going to

doing it in a straight line, that's one dimension.

I'm going to spray it horizontally.

Oh, okay.

okay okay but it's the same amount of water same amount of water okay so if I if now I spray it

then it has it's quote diluted by the area over which it has to right um travel correct okay so if that's the case then it drops off as

one over R is what one over the distance.

So if you're twice as far away, you're getting half as much as you would have if you were closer.

Okay, that's how that dilution would work.

So that's in two dimensions.

Okay.

Now, let's say you're now

spraying it in all three dimensions.

So that now it's like this wave, this spherical wave

emanating from the water gun.

Of course, you'll hit yourself in the face.

Yeah, because it's going in all directions, right?

Right, right.

So it turns out, if you go in all these directions, then it's being diluted by the area of the surface of that sphere.

Okay, gotcha.

Okay, gotcha.

So now it's being delete, and the formula for the surface of a sphere is 4 pi r squared.

So it's being diluted by the square of the size of the surface.

And so this is the famous 1 over r squared law that light experiences, that gravity experiences, because whatever is the source, it goes out and it's filling all of space.

And as it moves out, the intensity drops off as the square.

If you're leaving your universe, you're going in a direction that is not accessible to anything you have seen or know.

Okay.

Because you're exiting these dimensions.

Correct.

And now you're exiting and you're leaving our universe, crossing into another universe.

The strength of the gravity will now drop off by the cube of the distance.

And that's significant.

Right.

Okay.

So in other words, if

I'm a foot away from you and there's a certain strength of whatever is the field that I have, now you go two feet away from you, okay?

No, if I'm two feet away and now I go to four feet, I now have one eighth the strength.

Right.

Not half the strength.

Not half the strength.

Right.

Because it's a factor of two away and you cube that two times two times two is eight.

Right.

I have one eighth the strength.

Okay, so

I don't know any reason to think why other forces wouldn't have this extra dimension of dilution associated with them, exiting your universe and coming into

another universe.

Right.

Okay, cool.

Wow.

Yeah, so you're subject to a higher dimension of dilution

by leaving a universe.

And so, yeah, so that's why I think I said in an earlier question, it's not only the six times our gravity that it has going on for itself,

it's got to make up for that extra dilution to leave its universe and come in here.

So it's a honkering universe.

Wow.

Okay, cool.

that's how,

if, if that's what we're feeling, if that's what dark matter actually is.

Yeah.

Well, I got to tell you, Eric, after waiting years, you actually came up with a damn good question.

Good for you, buddy.

Yeah, we'll see you.

Yeah, we'll see you in a few years with another great question.

All right.

All right, let's

keep it going with,

oh, I love this.

The most happy boy 11 is the handle.

And Neil,

how does it all end?

Oh, and that's it.

That's the whole shit.

That's the whole question.

How does it all end?

Tron Aries has arrived.

I would like you to meet Aries, the ultimate AI soldier.

He is biblically strong and supremely intelligent.

You think you're in control of this?

You're not.

On October 10th.

What are you?

My world is coming to destroy yours, but I can help you.

The war for our world begins in IMAX.

Tron Aries, rated PT13.

Maybe inappropriate for children under 13.

Only in theaters October 10th.

Get tickets now.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive, where drivers who saved by switching save nearly $750 on average.

Plus, auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts.

Quote now at progressive.com to see if you could save.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, national average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023.

Potential savings will vary.

Discounts are not available in all states and situations.

You know, between work and workouts, who has time to read every label in your food and supplement routine?

Guess what?

Now you don't need to.

Thanks to Thrive Market.

Their on-site filters do it for you.

Organic, low-sugar, high-protein, you name it, they can filter it.

Then your pantry staples arrive fast and here's the best part, to your door.

Their groceries are high quality and no junk.

Over 1,000 sketchy ingredients restricted so you can shop worry-free.

You know, summer is a time of letting go, but it's time to get back to your regular routine.

And Thrive Market makes healthy grocery shopping effortless and affordable, giving members clean, high-quality groceries delivered to their door.

No label confusion, no stress, no markups.

Looking to cut out artificial dyes, process sugars, or try out some vegan alternatives?

Thrive Market has a ton of on-site filters so you can easily filter your preferences.

For me, it's all about not messing up my workouts.

So, what do I want?

High-protein, tasty snacks that I can snack on without getting my trainer upset with me.

Go to thrivemarket.com/slash Star Talk to get 30% off your first order and a free $60 gift.

That's ThriveMarket.com slash Star Talk.

The question was asked by, who was it?

Little Boy11 or something?

What is it?

Yeah, Most Happy Boy 11.

Most Happy Boy 11.

Yeah.

I wanted to know, how will it all end?

Yes.

The universe will end

not in light, but in dark.

Not in fire,

but in ice.

Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Oh.

Oh, that's terrible.

Okay.

Poor universe.

Beyond that little bit of simple language,

there's an entire section of the Cosmic Queries book

that specifically addresses all the scenarios of how we will end.

And so I'm going to be, I'm going to pull rank here and say, buy the damn book when it comes out.

Oh, wow.

There you go.

What I will do, I hate doing that, but

a lot of effort went into those chapters.

I'm going to pluck, for me, the scariest ending of them all.

Okay, good.

I like that.

All right.

Wait, hold on.

Hold on.

Let me get my flashlight and put that.

All right.

Let's get it.

Let's get it.

Chuck, imagine he's around a campfire

in the dark, but he's in a completely lit room.

Right, okay.

Exactly.

So here you go.

This expansion of the universe, this acceleration,

there's no reason for any of us to think it will ever end.

It will keep accelerating.

in its expansion.

Okay.

So as we described earlier, the galaxies, the distant galaxies will expand beyond our horizon.

Then the nearby ones will no longer be nearby because they would have been stretched to the edge of the universe.

Then the power of the stretching will overcome the gravitational binding of

stars with other stars and stars with their planets.

So we would see our galaxy systematically get stripped apart with stars being cast beyond the horizon as it expands.

And this will continue.

So not only will every star get cast asunder to beyond our horizon, such that our sky will contain only one star, and that is the sun.

Except the sun won't live that long, but let's pretend it's still there.

Then, the stretching of the universe will rip the planets away from the star, so that we will then become alone in our own bubble within our own horizon in the universe.

Then, it will keep stretching and it'll begin ripping the earth apart.

And by the way, this is happening at a faster and faster rate.

And you can calculate when the expansion of the universe rips apart the very particles that comprise matter itself.

Oh, no, wait.

And the very, the very,

what's called a Planck length, the very,

the granularity of the quantum universe itself gets ripped apart.

And in fact, this is called the big rip.

Oh, my, oh, the universe split its pants.

Oh my goodness.

I mean, literally,

it split everything.

Wow.

It bent over and split its pants.

Chuck, I love that description.

And that, if the universe goes that way, it'll happen

between 10 to the 30 and 10 to the 35 years around there.

Okay.

So that's a lot of years in the future.

Well, there you go, happy boy.

I hope you lose sleep over that.

You ain't happy anymore.

No.

By the way, there was an episode of Doctor Who where there was a tear in

the space-time fabric, and that tear would show up, and you would like see it.

And so that was particularly scary for me because I know what, you know, what the theories tell us.

Right.

Yeah, so the big rip, freaking me out.

The big rip.

All right.

Let it freak you out too, so I'm not the only one.

There you go.

All right.

Oh, by the way, and that's just one of a dozen scenarios given in that chapter.

Oh, cool.

Excellent.

All right.

And read it to your kids, people.

Bedtime story.

A wonderful bedtime story.

Wonderful.

All right.

Here, this is Chloe Wagstaff.

Chloe Wagstaff says this.

How can artists, in your opinion, contribute to science?

They already are.

Oh, my gosh.

So, first of all, historically, before we had cameras,

especially the naturalists, but also astronomers too, if you saw something, you just drew it.

And not all scientists are good at drawing.

So you see Galileo's sketches, they're not too bad.

Right.

In his notebook, they're pretty good.

Better than I can do, I think.

But if you had a real artist, they could totally rock.

the scene and put what is actually out there on the page.

And all the naturalists who were documenting flora and fauna of the world as they traveled the world to

all the manifestations of life on Earth.

Every one of those were either artists themselves or carried an artist in the back, you know, in the wagon

with them.

And so, one of the most famous of these are the Audubon paintings.

All right.

You know, we hold them up as art, but

this is a scientific record of birds.

Right.

And until photography could do that or do it well or capture the color of them, that was the only thing we had.

So we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to artists, the scientific illustrators of the day.

But then when photography came, it sort of relaxed that requirement.

But there were still some things you had to draw because photography wasn't all that sensitive to light.

So if it was really, really dim, you still had to draw it.

Early astronomical images were still drawn, even though photography was available.

Well, let's fast forward to today.

So, no, we don't, sorry, I don't need you to draw my Hubble

photo because we got really good imagery of it.

Sorry.

However, you know what I need you for?

You know what I want you for?

Design, graphic design.

They're artists.

Okay.

I like

some things better than others, even if they have the same functionality

because some objects are just beautiful to behold or to touch or to

carry with you.

I value that.

I think that's, you know, we can have a a utilitarian world, but is that the world you want to choose to live in?

No, you want the world where that's a beautiful space.

That's a beautiful, I'm talking about architecture now.

That's a beautiful building, a beautiful room.

It's been organized beautifully.

What's the fen shui of that room?

Those aren't scientists thinking that up.

Those are artists.

You just described Apple computers.

I try not to mention the name because

we're not paid by Apple or any computer company.

There's still time.

There's still time.

So in that way, artists, I think, make a beautiful world in which scientists function.

But otherwise, no, I don't see that happening.

There's a big push to get A in STEAM,

science, technology, engineering, and math.

You put an A in there and STEM becomes STEAM.

And with the urge that if you train scientists to be artists, it can boost their creativity.

And I don't know how successful that will be.

Yes, you have to be creative as a scientist.

But the number of scientists who said, you know, I thought about this new discovery after I looked at this work of art or after I painted this,

those numbers are not high.

And I know of one case, a guy named Ed Belbruno, who looked at Starry Night.

by Van Gogh and it got him thinking about orbits, transfer orbits between Earth and the moon because of the swirls of the paint.

So it got him thinking.

I think that's great.

Does it mean he would have never had those thoughts without seeing the painting?

I don't know.

I do know, however, that science and engineering greatly affect art.

When neon was invented or discovered, you can have neon glowing tubes.

Artists were all over it with neon sculptures and things.

And so when we make chemical

discoveries or discoveries in material science or in computing, the artists are all in it and all over it.

There'd be no modern special effects were it not for artists exploiting the computing foundations that were created by basically math geeks 60 years ago.

So

there is a two-way street, but most of the traffic really goes to towards the artists rather than towards the science, but based on my read of the history of this.

Well, there you have it.

Artists, you guys, you're not, we don't need you.

Okay.

Now, you know that's a joke.

Nobody.

Let me say it differently.

Go ahead.

Go ahead.

Maybe if more scientists took art class,

then there would be more creativity expressed than they believed possible.

Right on.

Okay.

But I want to see that tested, and I think it's worth an experiment.

Yeah, I think I want to see scientists take communications classes more than I want to see them take art classes.

Because

that's what we need.

We need people to listen to scientists

more than anything.

One last bit of that.

I don't want to eat up this whole segment on this, but

if you look at Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or even Van Gogh's Starry Night, if they didn't create those,

no one ever to be born will ever create them.

Right.

They are singular expressions of the creativity of those artists.

Okay.

Whereas if Einstein had never discovered relativity, somebody else would have, or some combination of people would have, and they would have discovered it in exactly the way he

showed it to us.

And so the creativity of a scientist is not existing

in a free

thinking

way, because ultimately nature passes judgment on whether what you invented works at all

so the creative process has different landing zones right well that makes sense that makes sense because science is bound by laws whereas creativity that we didn't create

creativity is about breaking laws

i liked it very nicely put yeah exactly cool all right yeah definitely let's go to lightning round see how many questions we can get in okay here we go um

all right i don't know if we're going to lightning round with this question because it's a great question.

This is Ms.

Kell, 8893.

What questions

are we not

and should be asking about the universe?

Damn!

Oh, that's that's a, I mean, that's really cool.

All right, I got one.

You ready?

Go ahead.

Okay.

The question that we should be asking and we're not

have not yet manifested because the discoveries necessary for us to occupy the new vista, which enables those questions to then be in sight of our curiosity, have yet to be discovered.

Oh my God, you thought about this before.

Next question.

Oh, my God.

Okay, I'm just going to say that was a really good answer, man.

Okay, next.

All right, next question.

Here we go.

This is

Vitesh Sinna, who says,

do you believe in a borderless world?

And how could we possibly make that happen?

Borderless Earth?

No countries?

No countries.

Borderless Earth.

Okay, so I don't mean when world, I was there, they mean the universe, but earth.

Yeah, I think borders are embarrassing.

They're just embarrassing.

If an alien came down and said, oh, you all human?

Yeah.

So, well, then why is this guard raid here?

Why are you, why is there a war?

Oh, because even though we're all human, we're finding reasons to kill each other by these slight differences that we tried hard to find, found them, and invoked them as reasons to mistreat each other, to kill each other, to enslave people, to round them up into concentration camps.

And so,

yeah, we'd have to somehow tell that to the aliens as they look at us befuddedly like, what the hell is wrong with that?

They'll go back.

There's no sign of intelligent life on Earth.

Wow.

Often a common enemy brings people together.

COVID should have been that enemy where we'd say, Let's put down

our differences and fight this because it will attack us all, no matter who we worship, or who we have sex with, or who we, all the other things that create fights among us.

We have a common enemy, people.

Let's fight it together.

And that didn't even happen.

Wow.

I give us a D plus on that.

Okay.

The only reason I don't give it an F is because some progress was made in the effort to make the

vaccines.

Right.

So

I don't have hope.

I think deep down within our DNA, our tribalism will forever prevent that from happening.

And I wish I could sound more positive, but based on my read of history, I can't.

Well, a sobering answer, to say the least.

I think we got to end there, Chuck.

No, get out of here.

All right, wait.

Wait, one last one.

Very, very,

go.

Okay.

Saraba Pandav says this.

Has humankind ever seen in the night sky a supernova?

Good one.

So first we discover hundreds of them a year with dedicated telescopes, dedicated telescopes that go from galaxy to galaxy looking for something that blew up since last night.

Okay, a supernova lasts, you know, visibility lasts weeks and into the months.

So we have dedicated experiments just for that purpose.

But for the unaided eye,

the first exploding star visible since Kepler

in the 1600s was in 1987.

There was a guy in the observatories in Chile, in the Andes Mountains, who was looking through his telescope and he sees this bright object in what he's looking at.

And he says, No, there's something wrong with the telescope.

So he says, let me just walk.

So he goes outside the telescope, looks up, there's a bright object.

okay so this is a case where he's using his eyes to verify the machine rather than the machine to verify his eyes and that was discovered i think in february in the year 1987 it was the first supernova discovered that year and it is the famous 1987 a

and it is the most studied supernova in the history of the world And all our telescopes, we have a very good communication system among us.

All the telescopes around the world abandoned whatever research projects they were on at the time, slewed in the sky over and found this object.

And even when it was below the horizon, the telescopes were waiting for it to rise.

So you can get all kinds of data.

Radio waves, infrared, ultraviolet, visible, everything,

everything we could throw at it, we did.

And there are thousands of research papers on that exploding star.

Awesome.

Visible to the naked eye.

Well, there you have it.

Yeah, Google that.

1987, capital A.

It's all there.

All right.

Beautiful question.

Chuck, that's it.

We got to

wrap.

All right.

All right.

That was fun.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Very good.

So, all right, Chuck.

I'll be looking for you.

It's a pleasure to be here.

I love your Twitter feed, especially when you live tweet live events.

Yeah, yeah.

Not much of that going on now, but I'll be tweeting the Super Bowl, that's for sure.

The Super Bowl, I'll be looking for that.

Yeah.

Because

you don't play with this.

You don't give a cut anybody's slack.

No.

They're all jokes.

Everybody should be able to take it.

All right.

This has been Star Talk Cosmic Queries, a gumbo, Galactic Gumbo.

Yeah.

Oh, no.

With spice on this version.

So I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always.

Keep looking up.

With the growing population and the growing popularity of energy-consuming tech like AI, the modern world needs reliable energy sources to meet increasing demand.

Wind and solar are powerful, but not always available.

The unmatched reliability of natural gas makes it vital for our energy needs.

People rely on oil and gas and on energy transfer to safely deliver it through an underground system of pipelines across the country.

Learn more at energytransfer.com.

Honey, do not make plans Saturday, September 13th, okay?

Why, what's happening?

The Walmart Wellness Event.

Flu shots, health screenings, free samples from those brands you like.

All that at Walmart.

We can just walk right in.

No appointment needed.

Who knew we could cover our health and wellness needs at Walmart?

Check the calendar Saturday, September 13th.

Walmart Wellness Event.

You knew.

I knew.

Check in on your health at the same place you already shop.

Visit Walmart Saturday, September 13th for our semi-annual wellness event.

Flu shots subject to availability and applicable state law.

Age restrictions apply.

Free samples while supplies last.