Cosmic Queries – Get Some Space

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Jasla hora, mi gente.

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. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.
And for this edition of Star Talk, it will be Cosmic Queries.

I think it's a grab bag edition, but I got to check with my co-host, Chuck Nice. Chuck.
Yes, what's up, Neil? And you are correct, sir. So the first query has been answered.

First query is, what are the queries about? So what happens happens is we solicit, normally we solicit topics, but others sort of dribble in and they sort of collect.

We're housekeeping really by getting tending to the questions that are completely random coming from every direction, every compass direction of the universe.

Which is good too, because people get very upset when their questions go and don't when their questions go unanswered, but they don't realize that when we're soliciting new questions, it's because it's a different topic, like you said.

it's a different thing, right? Yeah, it's not like we can just continue. So, yeah, you're right.
This is a great way to do some housekeeping and make some people happy. So, let's do this.

Let's do this. All right.
All right, let's jump right into this. Of course, give it to me.
So, let's start with a Patreon patron. This is Abdul Aziz bin Rajab.

And he says, Hey, quick question:

What form or thing can sustain itself and not be destroyed by a black hole or what then can sustain itself the most and to which degree would it be able to hold itself together when entering a black hole so is there anything that can withstand

the oh your term i'm about to use is there anything that isn't spaghettified when it goes into a black hole No. Ooh.

Next question.

No, so what happens, it's a very simple calculation. Normally when we think of materials,

you know, we have eggs that'll break or steel that's strong or rubber that's flexible. So we have these sort of macroscopic descriptors for these things in our lives.

When you analyze it at a molecular level, because that's all the black hole is going to care about, and then the atomic level, as you fall towards the black hole, What gets you is what are called the tidal forces.

These are the forces that will stretch you head to toe as you fall in. Are you sure you want to go?

That's an old rhyme I penned 30 years ago. But anyhow,

so what's happening is the part of you that's closer to the black hole singularity feels a stronger gravity than the part of you that's farther.

So in a feet first dive, your feet will start falling towards the black hole. towards the singularity faster than your head will.

That's not a good situation to be in.

Initially it feels like a stretch. You know, who doesn't like a good stretch? But then you realize that it is unrelenting and growing.

And it reaches a point where the tidal forces exceed the molecular bonds that hold your flesh together. Then you snap.

in two pieces, your upper half and your lower half of your body.

But you might say, well, how about a brick of steel? Yeah.

Steel is held together more strongly than your body is, but there's still a breaking point for the atoms of steel, for the molecules that make up the steel, sorry, the carbon, the iron, and all that comprise the alloy that is the steel.

They're connected by some force, and you can calculate what that force is.

And there's a distance from the center of the black hole where the tidal forces will be so great that it'll rip apart the molecules and the atoms of your solid block of steel.

Yes, that'll happen closer in than what would rip you apart.

Yes, but it'll still do still going to happen it's still going to happen not only that it'll rip the atoms themselves apart and the nuclei that's what i'm saying that's what i'm saying oh man that's that's serious that's that's that's evil that's evil evil forces so the for this is where gravity wins over atoms nice so now let me just take abdul's question and for my own edification go a little further so when you're looking at the creation of a supermassive black hole when you get down to the place where it's

the

star that's dying is producing iron, and now there's nothing that can happen after that. So it's like, okay, I'm going to collapse in on myself, right?

So now, okay, so now you're, the iron is already there.

What happens as these things

or whatever it is, whatever matter it may be, falls towards this singularity

when it gets there.

Is it infinitely compressed? Does it have like a core?

What is happening at that point since you have these streams of particles that are now just, they're not even particles, they are just particles.

You say, where do they land?

Where do they go? That's what I'm trying to figure out. Where do they go?

So the only way to find out, Truck, is if we send to you.

Report back. Okay, just report back.

So

here's the problem. Einstein's general theory of relativity, which gives us the large-scale structure of the universe and the Big Bang and black holes and the like,

shows us that at the center of the black hole, the gravitational force exceeds everything molecular and atomic. And in fact, it compresses matter to a point of infinitely small size,

which means it has infinite density. Right.
Now, that's just crazy. So So, that is crazy.
So, I mean, that's inconceivable when I'm

trying to think of it, but it can't.

No point. Maybe that doesn't happen.

What I'm telling you is Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts that. So that could be the edge of where Einstein's relativity applies accurately to the universe.

Maybe before it hits the singularity, some other law of physics needs to be invoked

to extend our understanding of the universe beyond where Einstein then leaves us off.

Newton left us off. Newton's forces operated under relatively low gravity and low speeds, and it failed at high gravity and high speeds.
We needed Einstein to go into

the dark closet of the unknown. But now we know in advance that general relativity has these limits.
And so enter string theorists.

They come in and talk about the singularity. They've got a whole mathematical formulism to think about the singularity.
And so

either it really is infinitely small and infinitely dense, or there's another branch of physics that still needs work, string theory still needs work, to give us an understanding of that particular regime in the cosmos.

So yeah, I can't, I don't, so the answer to that question is, I don't have an answer. Right.
Well,

clearly no one does. What we do know, what we do know, he didn't ask this, but I would tell you, what we do know is that

we used to think or hope that if you went into a black hole, it's a portal to another place, perhaps another dimension, another universe itself. Right.
The problem is,

it turns out

the information that entered the black hole will ultimately come back out of that same black hole through Hawking radiation. The black hole will basically evaporate given enough time.

It'll lose its mass through particles. And the inventory of those particles that came out equals the inventory of particles that went in.

Which tells us that you can't take stuff, put it through a black hole and have it show up somewhere else. Wow, that still remains.
It makes perfect sense. It still remains in this universe.

And it's a remarkable discovery of modern quantum physics and black holes. That's incredible.

Yeah. That is an incredible.
Yeah. So the evaporation of a black hole through Hawking radiation kind of lets you know that it's not going anywhere.
It's actually, it's actually coming back out.

Coming back out. It's coming back out.
It's coming back out. Coming back out.
All right. And just so people, in case you didn't know what Hawking radiation is,

you remember E equals M C squared. You'd learn this in elementary school.
It's the equivalence of energy and mass.

E equals M, energy and mass. And C squared is a constant.
Constant. It's a speed of light, but it's actually not important about what I'm about to describe.

So you can convert energy into mass and mass into energy. They're interchangeable.

So it turns out in the vicinity of a black hole, the energy density of the gravitational field is so high that the energy will spontaneously create particle pairs.

And it creates a matter and antimatter particle. One particle falls back into the black hole, the other escapes.
And that's the source. And that's the evaporation.

And you take the inventory of those particles and it is exactly what fell in and got spaghetti in the first place. That's amazing.
Yeah. Oh my God.
Don't wait a minute. So it just dawned on me then.

So what you just described though, the information, you called it information, that means that there's a change of information then.

So

just to be clear, what's for me mind-blowing is matter enters the black hole. Right.
That's what I'm saying. Yeah.
And then the black hole has gravity because of that matter.

And the gravitational field, when it generates new particles,

remembers the matter inventory of what fell into the black hole in the first place. Oh, my God.
Yes. That's amazing.

There is some communication in the system where the entire system remembers what matter it had eaten. It has to, because otherwise it wouldn't be able to create the

portfolio.

Right. To put it off, to send it out.
That's great. So, this for me, that was the most amazing fact about that discovery.

And it's upsetting to science fiction folks because you want to go into a black hole and come out somewhere else. Yes.
So, now we need some other way to go to leave the universe. Oh, wow.
Okay.

Hey, man, great question, Abdul. All right.
Thank you so much. All right.
Let's see. God.
Okay. Here we go.
Let's do. Is that only one question? We're almost out of time for this first segment.

Who cares?

Who cares? It's good stuff.

All right. Go for it.
You know, it's it's just good stuff. Keep talking.
All right, here we go. This is

Giannis

Keosis. Okay, I said your name wrong, man.
Sorry.

Giannis, though, you know who I'm talking about from Facebook. He says, what will be more groundbreaking as a discovery and why? Understanding dark matter or discovering life

outside of our solar system

or even Earth.

Okay, so

the dark matter question would be amazing. It's the longest unsolved problem, longest standing unsolved problem in astrophysics.

We're going on 90 years not knowing what dark matter is. Look at that.
Okay. So, yeah, no, yeah.
So if we learn what it is,

that would be a great day in astrophysics. However, if it's simply another kind of particle that doesn't interact with our own and it's out there,

that we're hypothesizing anyway

that's not as interesting as if dark matter were the gravitational effect of a parallel universe influence so it whatever it is i'd want it to have far-reaching implications for me to get excited about it okay is it if we know dark matter do then we know dark energy and is there another thing do we now can we unpack black holes because we know is there some other thing that it comes with is this some package deal with other unsolved problems that get solved with it?

If not, I'm going with the discovery of life elsewhere

on an exoplanet. Because

for two reasons. If it's made of DNA,

either we're shared DNA and life got around in the early formations of solar systems, or

DNA is an inevitable consequence. of complex organic chemistry.
Right. So that wherever you find life, it would then be DNA-based.

Now think about it. Is that so much of a stretch? If you go to Mars, you find rocks that are familiar.

If you go to Europa, you find ice that you have seen before. So geology and chemistry seem to repeat.
You see volcanoes

on Io, one of Jupiter's moons.

So

why would biology have to be sort of unique to one place and not be a highly repeatable phenomenon? That's a fair question to ask.

But I can tell you that, so it would be interesting if it was based on DNA for both of those reasons. It would be even more interesting if it had nothing to do with DNA.

Yet it still was life self-replicating,

thriving.

That would be like, oh, we got to open up our definition and

our understanding of what life is.

And then

the biologists who, you know, they celebrate the diversity of life, but behind closed doors, they got to be honest with themselves. You know what they, you know, what that honesty is?

Oh, look at the diversity of life, plants and animals and fungi.

Behind closed doors, it's all

pretty much the same. It's routine.

It's nothing special, baby. All life has one common origin.

So what you want is another genesis, and then you can compare and contrast. Well, life requires this, but doesn't require that.

Well, you know, we used to think life required a 72-degree tide pool, you know, just to, no, no, you have extremophiles doing the backstroke in acid under radiation conditions. So every

new thing we learn about life on Earth tells us how hardy life is and how resilient it is to stress, to a system. Even if an organism dies, life in general seems to thrive.
And so

if we find life thriving under conditions undreamt of, with a chemistry unimagined,

for me, that would be a far greater discovery than just finding out another particle to add to the particle zoo that we then credit for being dark matter.

The particle zoo. I think I'm going to take my kids there.

Chuck, we got to take a quick break. When we come back, more cosmic queries.
Galactic gumbo. No, you say it, Chuck.
No home, galactic gumbo.

It don't mean about saying them garoni

when we return

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We're back. Star Talk, Cosmicquaries.

Grab bag edition, but Chuck calls it something else. Girl, glad that gumbo.
No, gumbo's got a lot of different ingredients in it. That's why we're saying that, right? Gumbo's got what?

You got oh man, you got everything. You got crab, you got corn, you you got crawdech, you got sauce, uh, andouille sauce, andouits, yeah, and you also have rice.
That's right, yeah, yeah, okay.

Oh, man, I think I told you this. I don't know if we talked about it on the air or privately, but Yvonne Gagne,

gosh, darn man, got to get you some Yvonne Gagne

gumbo. Uh, that she's

a friend of the family from New Orleans who used to make gumbo that would so, so where is it? So I'm waiting for it.

You're like, don't talk about it.

Do something. Clearly,

you have never mentioned it on or off the air because I haven't had it yet.

There you go. All right.
Well, we're going to.

We're going to do that. Here we go.
Let's go to Riyam Samari, who says, he's very poetic. So I'm just going to read

everything here because he's very poetic.

He says, the sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, will we one day venture to the stars? It was Carl Sagan's lifetime mission to encourage humanity to explore the universe.

And you, Neil, are calling for the same goal and carrying the message to a new generation.

Given the recent promising spaceflight developments of SpaceX, do you think that during our lifetime, we will finally see humans colonizing other planets or at least finding a glimpse.

of intelligent life on other worlds.

That's beautiful. Yeah.
Yeah.

This is a guy. This is a guy who spends a lot of time reading your stuff, clearly.

Okay.

So the answer is no.

Oh,

damn.

Oh, damn. I'm just saying.
This hurts. I'm just being on.
I mean. Oh, that was a hot knife and twisted.
Wow.

Okay, let's. He so eloquently asked this very, like, just super

optimistic question. And are you serious? Do you really think no? Yeah.
Yeah. He said our lifetime? No.
Wow. Can I tell you why?

Pull that out of my ass.

I have reasons for thinking this. Okay.

It's think about it.

What other planet in our own solar system comes closest to anyone possibly living on it? Which planet?

It's none. Well, Mars used to.
Mars. Mars, Mars.
Okay. Now,

because Mars has polar ice caps, it has seasons.

It's near us in the habitable zone. It once had liquid running water, doesn't today, maybe underwater, underground, you know, permafrost, frozen.
So, okay,

Mars, you ain't going to Venus. It's 900 degrees Fahrenheit, 500 degrees Celsius.
It's hotter than a pizza oven. You ain't going to Venus.
You're not going to Mercury. It's almost as hot.
Okay.

So,

Mars, do you realize that Antarctica

is wetter and balmier than every location on Mars?

Yet I don't see people lining up to buy condos in Antarctica.

Colonizing.

That's because Superman's a lousy neighbor.

Excuse me, he's in the North Pole. Oh, is he really in the North Pole? Yeah, I think I'm pretty sure it's the North Pole.

But there they showed land, but there's no land in the North Pole, so they got that wrong. That's right, right.

Santa is on an ice flow. That's right.

Whatever's left of it. Okay.

Santa's in a bathing suit right now,

sipping piña coladas.

With a polar bear wearing sunglasses.

You know what? We're laughing, but it's so sad. Go ahead.

The excuse is for Santa to get buff, right? If he's in a bathing suit on an ice flow. Exactly.
Sipping a drink. We'll give Santa with abs.
That'd be interesting.

So we don't see that happening. So the urge to live on Mars would be novel initially, I think.

But to say, I want to live here forever, I don't see that happening as an urge. You'll want to get back to Earth.
You'll vacation there briefly, but you'll want to get back to Earth. And so

I'm suspecting.

So for me, what you'd have to do is terraform the planets first. Wow.
Then they're Earth-like, and they can go there and pitch tent, and you get off the spaceship, and you don't suffocate.

When Columbus arrived in the New World

as one of the first Europeans, I guess after the Vikings,

when he stepped off his ship, he could breathe the air. He met other people here who greeted him.
He could eat the fruit. on the vines.
He could repair his ship. Why?

Because the trees in the New World were made of wood, just like the trees in Europe. So when people speak of the next generation of space exploration, analogizing to that era of explorers,

you're missing the point about dying when you step off the ship.

So it is supremely hostile to human physiology. That's all I'm saying.

And plus, if we do go to another planet and find civilizations, I'd like to think we've learned something about how to interact

with people who are there to greet you.

So lessons from the Columbus chapter of colonization is if you do find other life forms,

what's the playbook for how we're going to interact with those life forms, be they what we designate as intelligent or not.

By the way, NASA has an entire branch of itself called planetary protection, which is if you're going to visit a place that might have life and set send a probe there, you have to sterilize the probe completely so that if you sneezed on it before it was launched, you don't get rhinovirus

on the planet that you're going to be exploring for life itself. And for any samples that get returned to Earth, they have to be quarantined to make sure that nothing then contaminates Earth.

Cool. So that's my longer answer, but the answer is still no.
Wow. I mean, look at it.

Yeah, but not to call. I don't see colonization.
Yeah, yeah, it makes sense.

It makes sense. Sorry, Riyam.
Sorry, buddy. Okay.
Sorry, buddy. There we go.

This is Brett Marshall from Facebook, and I just have to read this because I, you know, it's, I don't know why. He goes, hey, I'm still here, and I'm still too stupid to come up with a good question.

Okay.

But I listen to every show. That's what it said.
Yes. That's great.
That's not the whole, the whole thing? Oh, that's it. That's all he said.
I'm saying it again. Read it again.

I got to hear it again.

He goes, hey, still here. Still too stupid to come up with a good question.
Listen to every show, peace.

Yeah,

well, I appreciate the sentiment. But by the way,

I don't judge whether a question is good or not.

In the end, is my answer good? You should be judging my answer, not whether you think your question is good.

Ask anything you feel.

That's what matters here. Okay.

All right, here we go.

This is

Duano Lee. Duanonly from Instagram.
Hello, Dr. Tyson.

How far do you think our advancement in science would be if the United States budget used for the military was actually used towards science and technology? Oh my God.

What a question.

Okay, so the budget, I haven't looked at the very latest budget, but last time I looked, the budget for the National Science Foundation was about $30 billion.

NASA's budget is about 20 billion. So you put them together, you get about 50 billion.
There are other ways we spend money on science.

For example, the National Institutes of Health does medical research, this sort of thing.

So if you add up all the portfolios in all disciplines of science research in America, you get up maybe $70 billion, maybe $100 billion.

That's a lot of money. The military spends $600 billion every year

On the military. Now, a lot of that is standing armies, literally and figuratively.
It's like, you know, pay or play. It's like what, if, oh, you want to fight a war? That's on top.

Right, exactly. Oh, you know, a war? I didn't know you want to fight a war.
We need more money for that. Okay.

So,

so

It's not always true that throwing money at something at that high rate leads to a discovery.

Sometimes you have to move through a place where new ideas percolate, germinate, and maybe those new ideas come from

a wrong result. It could be

a wrong result says, wait a minute, no, we were doing it wrong the whole time. It's really this.

And you couldn't have had that thought unless you landed in a place where you had done it wrong in the first place. Some of this takes time.

So

I would say the way to think about this is they have peer review research grants.

And so I write a grant, I say, I want to do this research, and it can take me this long, it's going to take me this much money, I want to hire this many people, I want to do it in this location.

And they approve. Okay.

So here's what happens. Depending on how much money there is and how many people are applying, you get to grant 10% of applications.
Sometimes 50%. Well, how about the other 85%?

Well, you can say, well, these are just not worth funding. But these others were on the border and they should be funded, but we can't fund everything.
You want money for those. Okay.

That would, I think, double what we're currently spending.

So I would say if you want as healthy a science budget as you have, given the number of scientists in the country, if you doubled all the science budgets, that would get us pretty far, pretty quickly.

Now, how advanced would we be? Again, it's a matter of time.

Okay. If civilization didn't spend so much time in the dark ages,

or rejecting what science could have been,

if scientists weren't sorcerers or people who had some knowledge of the natural world, if we weren't crediting oceans to Zeus or to the wrath of God or to other supernatural forces?

And we said, no, wait a minute, maybe they're natural forces. Had that begun earlier, it's possible we might have been on the moon in the 19th century rather than in the 20th century.

But again, it takes developments, right? You have to figure out, well, we need this new material.

We have to dig for it. Well, where are we going to dig? Is the geology up to matched with that? And we have to understand the human physiology.
Is medicine at that place?

So it's very complicated.

In a good way, it's complicated. I mean, you want a lot of different things happening, but you also need bridges and tunnels connecting these discoveries so that the next

innovation can exploit what had come before in any discipline that it needs to make that happen.

So I would say

to punch science along at the rate it should, you'd have to double all budgets. And otherwise, yeah, we've probably lost a few centuries in the history of civilization.
Wow.

Because of people standing in denial of the role of natural forces relative to supernatural.

Yeah.

And we're headed back there. So yeah, Dave.

So way to go. Way to go, world.
Way to go.

Look that I tweeted recently.

I said every disaster movie begins by people ignoring the warnings warnings of a scientist that's right every disaster movie yeah okay this is n jonesy 19 from instagram he says um can you please explain the horizon problem it would seem that no matter where you are you are in the center of the universe which means all locations are the center of the universe um

That really begs another question. Is there a center of the universe? And how many licks does it take to get to the center of that universe if you're over 60 you'll remember that tv commercial

for the tootsie pop no they bought that back

did they bought that yes i'm sorry yes they did how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop or something like that yeah it depends on how slobbery you are exactly i mean i knew that i was a kid when i first i was nine i said it depends on how wet your tongue is

what are we even doing here you know um

so oh no the i iMode was, it's because you'll bite it before you lick all the way. That was the.
Oh, that's the, yeah, that's the catch. Yeah.
Yeah, because you get the candy in the middle. So.

So what is the horizon problem? Yeah, well, there are other, there's something, what he's citing is not entirely the horizon problem. So, but let me just explain horizons, right?

When you're a ship at sea, and if you just look around, the distance from you to the last bit of water that you can detect is the same in every direction.

And that distance is farther the higher up you are in the ship. So the quote crow's nest, the highest point on a ship, is where the lookout person stood to see, to look for icebergs, to look for land.

They would be the first to see this because they have the farthest view over the curvature of the earth. Land ho.

Yeah, exactly. It's that person who sighted it, not someone looking over the railing.
So

it's clear and understandable that if you're at sea, the horizon is the same distance to you in each direction.

Now, another ship, also in the middle of the ocean, has the same, sees their own horizon. Everybody is the middle of their own horizon ocean.

And what we don't know in our own universe is whether, is there a point you can stand where your horizon doesn't go the same distance out? Does it end?

And in principle, yes.

In principle. But what I can tell you is that every direction we look,

when we look 14 billion light years distant, we see the origin of the universe just now reaching us. So that means everybody

at that distance, okay, at that time distance away from us, is experiencing the beginning of the universe.

If in this direction they were not, and I saw a regular galaxy there, and in this direction I see them being born,

whoa,

that would mean I'm not, I've land ho, okay?

It would mean this direction is different from this direction.

And if you're out at sea, if there's land that way, but sea in every other direction, water in every other direction, something different just happened. And so

that becomes a more intriguing part of the universe. We'd all be focused that way if that were in fact the case.

Now, the horizon problem, as stated, just the horizon problem, means something different from what he asked.

It has to do with if this horizon is very different from that horizon.

There's several manifestations of this, but one of them is, how can that part of the universe be at exactly the same temperature as this part of the universe?

How would it know to be the same temperature unless the whole universe was somehow connected to itself in a very small place? All right.

And it had to be really connected because the difference in temperature in every direction is like a hundredth of a degree Kelvin. Wow.

You don't have that consistency of temperature from one side of your room to the other. Wow.
Much less one side of the universe to the other.

And so this is part of what we think of as the horizon problem. And this is where we got to inflationary cosmologies.
So these are the details.

That's in the, what do you you call it, in the, in the weeds of the Big Bang. When they say, oh, the Big Bang is having problems, there's just challenges within the weeds.

But the broader picture that we began as an explosion 14 billion years ago, that's intact. It's like what's going on in the weeds that we have to try to understand.

Interesting.

Wow. All right.
Well, cool, cool.

We've got to end there. We've got one more segment left of Cosmicqueries

Potpuri.

Cosmic Query's grab bag. Cosmicquaries.
Cosmicquaries Galactic Gumbo. No man getting it home.

When we return.

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We're back, Star Talk Cosmic Aquarius, Grab Bag Edition. Let's do it.
All right, here we go. This is P.N.
Wonders who wants to know this.

With Earth gathering mass from space material all the time, when will the mass increase to have an effect on Earth's orbit? And what would that effect be? Yeah, that's a great question.

So Earth plows through, in our orbit, Earth plows through several hundred tons of meteor dust a day.

Hundreds of tons. Okay, so write down that number, several hundred tons in a day times 365 days times 4 billion years, and figure out how much mass that is.

And then compare that to the actual mass of the Earth.

That's like a gnat flying full speed ahead into an elephant and the elephant says, hey, quit the shoving. It's not going to happen.

It is uninterestingly small relative to the total mass of the Earth. So no, not to worry about that.
So nothing to worry about there. Negligible as this.

Sleep, sleep, sleep.

Sleep well tonight. Yes.
PN Launders.

Oh, by the way, there's something else happening. The sun is slowly losing mass through solar wind.
You heard about solar wind. These are particles.

Have you, where's your concern about the sun's mass? Well, the sun is actually getting lighter. And as it gets lighter, the speed with which we are in our orbit

is too fast to maintain that orbit, and it goes to a higher orbit. Okay, so in fact, the fact that the sun is losing mass is making Earth slowly spiral away from it.

And the sun sun will lose mass at an ever faster rate as the billions of years unfold. And we'll end up, all the planets will end up orbiting farther and farther away.
That's one of the

fates of the solar system. The solar system is a cruel, cruel mistress.

It's yes, it's crazy.

God. All right, here we go.
Bugger dude from Instagram. Bugger dude says this.
How did astronomers find out that the edge of the observable universe is 43 billion light years away.

Okay, so

let's resolve this.

So most of us, we astrophysicists, when we think of the edge of the universe, we say it's 14 billion light years away. That's not really true, okay? The part of the universe we can see,

the light that was sent by that has been traveling for 14 billion years. But that thing that emitted the light, that's not 14 billion light years away right now.

It has been part of the expanding universe and is now 40, low, 40, 43, 45

billion light years away in that direction, and 45 billion light years away in that direction. So, you want to speak of the diameter of the universe, you're talking 90 billion light years.

You just don't observe that. And so, so much of my field tries to anchor itself in what you can see see rather than what you calculate to be true.

So, yes, we can calculate how far away that galaxy is that we're watching right now being born 14 billion years ago in the Big Bang. Where is it today? It's a full-grown galaxy.

It's fully full, red-blooded galaxy, and there it is, or green-blooded if it's got copper for its hemoglobin. And there it is, 45 billion light years away, and you don't see it there.

So, that's how that was. So, you have to calculate based on the known expansion rate of the the universe where that is today.
Right.

So basically, the cosmos is an annoying grandmother that pulled out an album of baby pictures.

I guess a little bit.

Who pulls out albums of anything? Yeah. Chuck, how old are you? Oh, I still know.
I still keep,

I print out my photos and I put them in. Answer my question.
How old are you? Well, it's the same as scrapbooking as far as I'm concerned. It's like, you know, because you know why?

Ladies and gentlemen, Chuck is 75 years old.

It's just a black, black don't crack, so he looks good.

And you know what? I need some tea.

I'm cold and I need some tea.

And your rheumatism is acting up. It's going to rain soon.
Well, it's going to rain tomorrow, my

so here we go. This is

Ashcott and his last name.

Yeah. I'm Patrick Carr.
Okay. Patrick Carr.
All right.

Take sure that one, you have to think about that, Chuck. You're not just, you have to read it and think about it and then say it.
Yeah, because I mean, you know. Okay.
All right. Yeah.

Hello, Dr. Tyson.
And hey, Chuck, please pronounce my name.

Wait a minute.

Ashot. Okay, the Akshat.
So he gave a phonetic.

He gave me his, you know what, Akshat? Thank you, my friend.

He gave me, there you go. He says, my question

is

that about 400 years ago, Sir Isaac Newton, hey, Neil, I know that's your man, discovered the laws of motion and gravity. He also discovered calculus and had already discovered the laws of optics.

How was he so focused and deeply indulged in his work during the plague, which was a pandemic during that time.

How was he able to manage his mental health? And how can we manage our own mental health and have a spark of our own creativity and imagination during this time of peak anxiety? And

Akshat is coming to us from India. Love you.

Thank you, Akshat.

So first, I don't claim any mental health expertise, but I do know a little bit about Isaac Newton, and I know a little bit about others who have made singular contributions to our understandings of the natural world.

And one of the things they all had in common was that they had episodes in their life either thrust upon them by Isaac Newton escaping the Black Plague in London and in Cambridge.

He was a professor at Cambridge, or at least in school at Cambridge.

Or if you have an injury that sort of lays you up for a period of time,

all of these people had long periods of time where they were in solitude,

Solitude. And so the brain just

explored on its own.

Today,

other than families that have many young kids running up and down, so there is no solitude and everyone is quarantined together. There are others who just can't go to work and you live alone.

You can't go to the bar or the club. So what are you doing? Are you sitting alone on the couch thinking?

Or are you binging on the latest Netflix series?

So we live in a time where many people's creative

juices that might have otherwise flowed

are arrested because they have distractions in their life. Evening television, on-demand television, streaming services.
So I lament.

I wonder what discoveries remain unrevealed

by brilliant people today simply because of the distractions we have built into our own lives.

And the distractions are fun. They're not chores.
We enjoy them. All right.
But

and sitting alone by yourself staring into the ceiling, no one would call that enjoyment, but that's exactly the conditions under which Isaac Newton contemplated the cosmos.

And Darwin contemplated the cosmos, his long walks alone in the woods. No, there wasn't a TV screen.
There wasn't advertising. There wasn't, oh, I got to get back and watch, you know, West World.

No, none of that was going on in their lives. So

if you ever had a chance of making such a discovery about the natural world, it's not going to, I don't think it's going to happen while you are distracting yourself with modern media or hanging out on Facebook or anything else on the internet.

It's just not. Unless something there gives you an idea, you could be a fertile person.
Oh, that's an idea. That's an idea.
But then you step away and develop the idea. How about that?

Okay, so for me, that's what's behind that. And one of my great disappointments in the coronaverse,

the coronaverse quarantine is I'm not giving myself enough solo time.

Because I'm catching up on email and I'm doing it, and I, you know, I'm cooking and I'm perfecting some recipes, both my wife and I, we both like food. So we're doing that.

There's some other things, but it's not quite, let me just be be alone and think and write. So I'm failing on that myself.
But, and plus, not everyone is Isaac Newton. You know, so,

yeah.

That's an understatement.

Yeah. Oh, by the way, Isaac Newton, all evidence suggests that he was, I don't want to call it quite a misanthrope, but he did not really enjoy the company of other people.
He never married.

He never had kids. So if you don't enjoy the company of other people, then being sent to the country home in Lincolnshire away away from other people,

that's a godsend to you.

Right? Yeah. And so, yeah, there you have it.
I forget, I don't know, I forget who said this, but there's a writer and she said, the greatest impediment to creativity is distraction.

Oh, yeah, sure, definitely. Yeah, but and basically right along what you just said.
And there's another, there's another saying, which is, if you want to be more creative,

then become less productive. Right.
Yeah. That, see, now that's where I'm a Viking.

Because when you say, oh, I went shopping, I did this, I made free,

and look how much I got done today. Well, did you create anything? Chances are the answer is no.
Yeah. Well, you don't give your mind a chance to do that.
So, yeah, right, yeah, cool. All right.

So

here we go.

This is Alfredo Baldo Castiano, who says, Oh, you're showing off now. You're out of the mood.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He says, dear friends, I have a black hole question.

If a black hole is a point of

infinite density, that means it can bend the space-time so much that a particle falling inside can accelerate so much that it can reach the speed of light. Now, he put a question mark at the end.

wrote it as a statement, but he's asking it as a question.

So if a particle falls into a black hole,

is the gravity so strong, since light can escape, will it cause the particles coming in to reach the speed of light going in? They'll come close, depending on how far away they

emanate,

but no.

No, no, the answer is no. So you can calculate this.
So if the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light, it means if, just put it right at the speed of light, just for this example.

If you went the speed of light, you can escape the black hole. It'll keep tugging on you, slowing you down, but you'll reach infinity and have zero speed there.
It's weird to speak on these terms.

If you had more than the escape velocity, you'll reach infinity and still be going.

Okay, if you have less than the escape velocity, it just pulls you back. So it depends on what distance you fall into the black hole from.

And you can calculate what your speed is. And it's not, in most cases, it's not anywhere near the speed of light for that.

Gotcha. So, the answer is basically nope.
No, yeah, all right.

And by the way, a lot of material spirals into the black hole, really, it doesn't just, yeah, because that's what you see, these are disks of matter. Oh, that the accretion

disc, very good, very good. I got an accretion disc of my own right here.

That's well, that's that you and your wife are cooking. See, that's

this is the results.

Good accretion disc cooking uh with another cookbook right maximizing the accretion disc um yeah so in fact most matter that falls into black hole is spiraling in it's not just falling straight in very cool

um this is um

f-l-b-o-q i don't know what that i don't know what that is uh from instagram he says it looks like a random hits on a keyboard it really does f-l-b-o-q

uh he says while i was listening to the podcast I heard about nuclei getting spaghettified. If the nuclei get spaghettified, uh-huh, here we go.
What about the quarks?

I have an answer for that. I don't know.

Yeah, I have to, if I were to guess, I would say it also spaghettifies the quarks. Wow.
Because it's pretty bad down there. That is really nasty, man.
It's nasty. It is.

I mean, you are literally tearing an atom apart. Well, wait, so you tear the atom apart by ripping off the electrons.
That's nothing, okay? Electrons are easy.

But then the nucleus, which is very tightly packed, that gets spaghettified. And they're asking, now that you've spaghetified the nucleus, now you have the nuclear particles, protons, neutrons.

And then you've got a problem. And it quarks.

And so I think the answer is yes, but pull in Jana to see what she says.

But

I think my answer is yes. Nothing.

Nothing survives a black hole.

Wow.

Damn. That's really just disturbing.

You know what'd be fun? It's a good poem that needs to be written. Ready?

Everything falling into a black hole gets spaghettified except spaghetti. It's already spaghetti.
It's already spaghettified. It goes straight in.
It's got no

problems. No one thing should have all that power.
That's all I'm saying. That's a lot of power.
Okay, this is

Teague Gwithen. Teague Gwithen.

People are making up stuff now, man.

And Chuck, this has to be the last question because we're spending too much time luxuriating on these answers.

Ah, it's okay. Here we go.
Teague Gwiethen from Instagram says this. What are your thoughts on the simulation theory? How likely is it that it exists? No, yeah.
So.

Okay, I'm happy to end on that because my thinking on that changed in recent weeks.

And Chuck, did we do an explainer before? We did. Yes, we did.
That's why I said go ahead and do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So

I now think

there's a better chance that we're not in a simulation than I had previously imagined. Okay, good.
Now let's stop there. And now go find that explainer so we can get more views on YouTube.

And I'm going to say, and Michael Bruce wants to know this. How can we?

Yeah, that's right. Now go find it.
Go find that explainer on YouTube. And we're going to get more views.
We're going to get more views now. So Michael Bruce wants to know this.

And while you're there, subscribe. Yeah, make sure you subscribe.
So Michael Bruce wants to know this.

How can we prevent a mass extinction event when the world governments believe more in listening to who pays them over scientific fact?

Wow.

So a better question, I mean, not a better question. A different question is, how do we elevate science to a place of respect when it comes to our leaders in government?

You know, I wish I didn't have to say this, but maybe science needs better advertising.

You know,

politicians can get you to like them just by a series of ads. Maybe we need that for science.

There's science in your life that you don't even know is in your life that's keeping you alive and breathing.

Most people who are alive today are alive because of some scientific advance in food production, in prenatal care, in

health, in sanitation.

i don't i think people it's easy to take something that's so embedded within your life for granted so once you do that then people will then see and understand what science is how and why it works and then they'll respect it and and then we won't go extinct from short-sighted politicians i hate to say that because science shouldn't need advertising right but maybe we teach people you know

maybe if you teach them to constantly see and embrace it then you don't need the ads teach them that in school. And so every day, hey, that's science.
Hey, that's science.

Hey, once you, if you do that, then it's built into the system. So by the way, when we were going to the moon, every day you were reminded what science was because we were going to the moon.

You didn't need someone to say, oh, we need more science teachers. How do we attract them?

People were climbing over themselves to study science,

technology and engineering and math, because they saw the fruits of that in that era. So,

yeah, I don't have a good answer. Extinction may be in our future for that very reason.
I'm science, and I approve this message.

On that happy note, Chuck, we got to call it quits there. All righty.
This has been Star Talk Cosmic Queries. Chuck, as always, thanks for being my co-host.
Of course.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here, bidding you to keep looking up.

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