Neil deGrasse Tyson - Are We Alone On Earth? The Truth About Aliens, UFOs, and Life on Mars | EP #118

Probability that there is life of any type on Mars. Today. Where do you put that?

Today? That's a little harder.

We've seen hearings in Congress, a number of hearings about UFOs.

All of a sudden we're thinking that the Pentagon has special access to aliens. I'm just thinking if we were being invaded by aliens, we would not require congressional hearings to establish that fact.

Is Earth life actually Martian life?

Yeah. As crazy as that idea sounds, it's completely plausible.

Hi everybody. Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moonshots. Today is a special episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech with the one and only Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Extraordinary author, scientist and just provocateur across all things in tech. So Neil and I can talk about what's going on in the space world. What's going on in SpaceX and Blue Origin. Are you a Musk fan? A Bezos fan? Will we go to Mars? Should we be going to Mars? Will humanity actually make it beyond the Earth unless a government or military presence pushes us there? Neil and I disagree a little bit on this. I'm going to be showing a series of slides. If you're listening on audio, you'll hear me referring to the slides that are coming up. We'll be discussing again the recent news pieces. If you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see the slides. We're going to be speaking about AI. We'll be talking about humanoid robotics. Again, Neil and I disagree. I think humanoid robotics are critically important, are going to be, you know, growing into the billions. Neil's not sure why we would have humanoid robotics. Anyway, join me for a fascinating conversation with a brilliant man, Neil DeGrasse Tyson. All right, let's jump in everybody. Welcome to Moonshots. And a special episode of WTF just Happened in technology this week. I have a friend, a dear friend, I wouldn't say an old friend because that sort of implies that you're old. But chronologically we did meet some 30, 40 years ago. Neil Degrasse Tyson. Neil, good to see you.

Yeah, thanks for having me. About time. You have me on your show.

I tell you, you don't.

Paul, you know, right. I'm here for you.

I appreciate it, buddy. I would love to talk about some of the recent advances in space and AI over the last couple of weeks that are pretty, I would say stellar. But that's are amazing just by the way.

It's not obvious to me, given how knee deep you are in all of these subjects, that I would be able to offer any insights to you at all that you couldn't offer yourself. I want to start the conversation that way.

Well, I have great faith that you have great wisdom and experience in all things space and many things, if not all AI. So a lot of drama this past month on the whole. Boeing versus SpaceX. I don't even know following this. So here's the situation about, I don't know, what was it here a decade ago? NASA is retiring the space shuttle and they want to put up humans in the future. They give out two contracts, one to steadfast Boeing and one to upstart SpaceX. This week, the upstart is saving the steadfast Boeing. Any thoughts on this?

Yeah, I never have strong opinions about what hardware ever gets used to go in and come back from space. By the way, I don't view it as the upstart beats the time. I don't think about it that way. I think about it as, you know, you're in the future when if one vehicle can't bring you back, you roll out another one. Okay, why isn't anyone celebrating that fact? And we know these two astronauts names, Sunita Williams and Is it Butch?

You know, Sunita's gotten all of the publicity. It's always about bringing her back nobody cares about.

Is it Butch Wilmore. I forgot his first name, but Wilmore. So Williams and Wilmore, all right, they. We know their names well, many of us knew them just because we knew them. They're veteran astronauts. But other people now know their names for the first time because of this fact that they've been stranded. And consider that that's evidence once again that we're living in the future of space exploration because no one can remember the names of anybody in space. When I was growing up, you knew everybody who went into space and the TV programs were interrupted to show you those launches. That's because they were unusual. They were rare. They were the first ever of any time we are reaching for the skies. It is so routine today that of course, we didn't know who was up there. Now we know. And now Boeing's not working. So we throw up SpaceX, they'll come back and they're veteran astronauts. The fact that the press was using the word stranded, meanwhile, there's a half dozen dozen other astronauts on the space station. How stranded can you be when there are other human beings there ready to hang out with until you get rescued? Plus, there's plenty of food, plenty of water, and there are people who, you know well, who pay top dollar just to get into space. So If I were them, if I were Sunita and Butch, I'd say, oh, I have to spend longer in space. Oh, that's too bad, isn't it? I guess. Let me just enjoy the rest of this time. So that's how I look at it.

You know, it's interesting. When do you think the next names that we will memorize and learn in school will happen? Is it the first people back on the moon, the first to Mars, or we just pass.

They'll be the first to Mars for sure.

Yeah, for sure.

And by the way, when we land people on Mars, you'll have to rename your podcast.

Off to Mars Shots.

Moonshots will be. Oh, that's not even a big project anymore. So, yeah, so those are my views there. And I think NASA is pretty calm about it. It was the press that I think the idea that one can be stranded in space carries a lot of clickbait with it. I'm old enough to remember in 1969 there was a movie, Marooned. I remember it. I was young at the time, but I remember we were landing on the moon and here's this fictional story of astronauts stranded in space. They could not come back out of orbit. I don't remember why, but they could not come back out of orbit. It had. Gene Hackman was in it, Gregory Peck was in it, and big actors of the day and of a generation. Anyhow, they couldn't come back and we had a rescue rocket to come rescue them. However, a hurricane was coming over Florida. And I'm young enough to say, well, how often do hurricanes happen? Growing up in New York City, then I realized, yes, that's a real thing that happens in Florida. So they couldn't launch, otherwise everybody dies. And someone realized this was brilliant, brilliant storytelling. Someone noticed that the eye of the hurricane was gonna pass over Cape Canaveral. And I said, well, why does that make a difference? Cause then I'm learning climate at the time. Oh my gosh, the ey of the hurricane is calm and peaceful relative to everything else. That eye came over the launch pad, they launched the rocket up, rescued the mission, and it was a happy ending. That's being stranded, okay? Not chilling with six other astronauts on something that, by the way, you know how much area they have in the module? You take a cross sectional area. I mean, obviously they live in the volume, but the area is like 400 square feet. And there are studio apartments in Manhattan smaller than that that people live in their whole lives. So, yeah, I had no sympathy for them. And I'm pretty sure they're happy to spend more time in space.

They are. In fact, speaking of people going up privately on the launch pad right now is the Polaris dawn mission. So this is a friend, Jared Isaacman, who made his money in the financial tech world and is funding private missions to the space station. This one's interesting because it's going to be going to a polar orbit and to new altitudes never seen since the Apollo days. Excited about this? Any thoughts on the Polaris?

A few things. Maybe it's not obvious to people that there's a reason why launches with great effort launches are are made as close to the Earth's equator as you can. In fact, there is a sea launch company that would launch your satellite from the exact equator because they just move their boat to the equator and then launch it there. But think about where we launch in the United States. It's not in Maine, it's not in Alaska, it's in Florida. And Florida is closer to the equator than most any place else in the continental United States. The reason for that, of course, is as Earth rotates, the equator is moving faster than any other latitude. It's going about 1,000 miles an hour. So that's an easy number to remember because the circumference of the Earth is about 25,000 miles and we rotate once in 24 hours. You divide the two, you get about 1,000 miles an hour. If you're anywhere else, you're traveling less fast. Well, if you launch east, something into orbit, you need less fuel because you're already going 1,000 miles an hour. And so if you need less fuel, you have more payload. So nearly all things ever launched in the history of the space program were launched near the equator, due east. If you can launch in any other kind of orbit, it takes way more fuel to accomplish this. And what's cool about polar orbits, however, which is many spy satellites have those orbits because you get to spy over Russia, it goes over the pole and then you spy and then it comes back over you and to give you the data. See, that's very convenient spy trajectories. But what's interesting about polar orbits, which is very common when we visit planets, is if you go into polar orbit, the planet rotates inside of your orbit so that you can paint photographic paths over the entire planetary surface and log a full map of what's going on. So. So these are good. And you're going to sell seats to it. I'd want to fly over the North Pole and check out Santa.

The only challenge is the radiation belts are not giving us as much protection over the poles. And because it's a higher orbit, I'm thinking about half my life these days. Neil is in the longevity business and I have grown up passionate about going to space. My only concern is getting too much cosmic radiation and too high a dose if I spend any significant time up there.

Yeah. What elevation will they be going?

Their orbit is going to peak at 700 km altitude, which is significantly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what factor two or so above the space station. And that makes them more susceptible to high energy particles from space, deep space, as well as from the sun. You know, we take it for granted we're in the, at the base of this ocean of atmosphere, protecting us not only from asteroids. Okay. Otherwise we'd look like the surface of the moon. But of course, the high energy particles deflect around Earth's magnetic field and they were protected by the, by that as well. So if you go up higher than that, you're at risk. Now, I don't know how long they're going to spend in orbit. Do you remember how long?

I don't. The trip has been delayed now by a week because of the downrange recovery location. But I think it will be on the order of five days thereabouts, which isn't too bad.

Yeah. And so, I mean, think about it. The radiation that we're speaking of does not require all that much to be shielded. So for example, a thin layer of water.

Yeah.

Will do that. And I imagine sort of long space flights, you would have your entire water supply forming just under the skin of the, of your vessel. Right. And the water just gets cycled in and out of there. Any good engineer would be able to design this. And there are other metals that it doesn't get through, so there are ways to protect yourself. And five days of this, I don't know if that's good or bad. Like you said, you're worried. But we do know that very, very low doses of radiation can promote longevity within you as your DNA gets mildly damaged, then gets repaired better than it was before at very low levels. And so, yeah, maybe they can just sign up for the medical experiments. We can find out whether the rest of us should take that trip.

You know what I'm excited about more than anything in the space business, and I'm curious what you are is the upcoming flights of Starship. Right. Starship is the Conestoga Wagon. It's the first transatlantic Conestoga Wagon.

Come on, dude, it's a Rocket. Give it a little more, give it a little more romance.

It's the Connie for transatlantic flights. What would you call it? I'm trying to go the pony express. Okay, Let me resurrect the railroads. The railroads. Okay.

When I first learned that Europe was pooling together their resources into a brand of airplane and they were going to call it the Airbus, it was like, no, no, no, no. How dare you. Okay. And if you look at the A380. Yeah, that's a big old fat bus. It's just, it's just a, we are cargo in those airplanes. And so I, maybe we're just, we're done with fancy words and we're just trying to move, move the population.

All right, so. Well, it's called Starship for the moment.

And it's not going to the stars. It's really a planet ship.

It is, it's a moonship and a planet ship.

Space is, is, is riddled with all manner of exaggeration that way. Okay? But NASA says they're going into space and they're going 200 miles above Earth's surface, which is like one, it's like one centimeter above a schoolroom globe. But not to an astrophysicist. Excuse me. So there's a lot of this exaggeration going on.

I pulled this clip from one other thing.

Is there still a Miss Universe contest? Because if there is, she's really Miss Earth. Okay? You should be clear about this. Okay? Stop the exaggerations out there.

All right? I pulled this clip from, I'll call it Twitter for the moment, even though it's a clip by Elon. And let me play this. I found this compelling. Take a look. See, A little super crazy. But the more you talk about it, I mean, I think at SpaceX we specialize in turning, converting things from impossible to late.

So.

But it's, it's pretty nutty because you're going to have this gigantic, you know, booster coming back. And I mean that's 9 meters in diameter, not counting the Chinese, or roughly 30ft in diameter. And it'll weigh about 250 tons. But on the heavy side, we'll make that lighter of a time. So that's the mechanism by which the starship Booster comes back. It lands with these giant mechanical arms being captured by the, by the original launch pad. So it could be refueled and sent back later that day. Reused. Yeah, yeah, that's audacious.

If every time you flew a 747 to London and they had to roll it off a cliff and bring out a new one. That trip would be really expensive. Okay, so, so what Elon is pioneering is not what is impossible in space exploration. He's pioneering what was unrealistic in terms of price and just cost. So the engineering is getting a workover. But consider that he hasn't done anything that NASA hasn't already done. The actual space frontier is still held by NASA. Right. And so, and it remains to be shown if his, his new ventures have commercial support, commercial value, because if they don't, then it's a one off and it's a spectacle. But it'll just, it'll go. What'll happen? It'll, you know, we'll applaud it. But then he goes on to his other projects.

I'll differ with you on that, please. I think honestly, you know, the space shuttle was an attempt for reusability. And you remember this when it was a first, when it was first proposed to Congress. The space shuttle, I think, had a per flight cost of $50 million and was supposed to fly 50 times a year.

Yeah, yeah, once a week.

And it ended up at a price tag of $4 billion a year, independent of how many flights it flew. Because it was a workforce initiative. Right. So four flights a year was a billion dollars each. One flight a year was $4 billion a flight. And the very, you know, while it reused the shuttle itself, the tank and the boosters were effectively, you know, the tank was, was thrown away and the boosters were refurbished, which was extraordinarily expensive. So I think what, what SpaceX has done is, is shown actual reusability of the Falcon 9.

I agree. These are engineering frontiers that have been breached here.

So you're saying whether the, whether the markets are there.

No, no, no, no. I'm just trying to, I just want to make it clear that when people say, oh, now Elon is leading us in space. No, he's not. He is making everything we used to do cheaper. Okay, so those are engineering technological improvements on what had been done by government spending with tax money, basically. Right. And to the extent to which he carries NASA product, including humans, into space, it's once again tax money, but spent by commercial enterprise rather than by NASA. I don't know where you were differing with me. I agree with you. It's way more efficient. And the shuttle never lived up to its hopes and expectations. But the shuttle nonetheless went in and out of orbit. Just like everything Elon has launched, it's gone in and out of orbit. So people, when you hear the people Dream of a space frontier is where have you gone lately? How far from Earth have you seen?

So let's talk about that. So SpaceX just announced its first ship to Mars is going to be called Heart of Gold. Okay, nice, poetic, but this is the conversation I wanted to have with you, Neil. It's the what should we be? Where should we be going? What should our vision be? So you and I have been in this industry long enough to know there were two different schools of thought on one side. And I think Bezos and Musk differ on this. Elon was let's go to Mars directly. I think the contracts at NASA for going to the moon has swayed him to go to the moon first and then to Mars. Jeff actually is much more in the school of thought. I am, which came from the days of Gerard o' Neill at Princeton, which is let's go to the moon, let's get resources there and let's not go back into a gravitational. Well, let's not dive back into something we have to use a lot of energy to get out of and instead let's build large scale o' Neill colonies and basically large rotating kilometer long cylinders where you live on the inside of the cylinder and build society there. I'm curious where you come out in this. Should we go to Mars and colonize that or should we use asteroidal materials and lunar materials to build habitats for large populations?

It reminds me of a lot of commentary that I published actually in one of my books several books ago called Space Chronicles, Facing the Ultimate Frontier. Just a side note, that was not the original title. I submitted it with the title Failure to Launch the Dreams and Delusions of Space Enthusiasts because that's really what the book is about. And the publisher said, no, you can't have the word failure in a title. And delusion, no, no, we have to. And so we tidied up the title, all right. But in it is a frank assessment of the mismatch between everybody's dreams about where we would or should be in space and what actually happens. If you go back to the 1960s, we're walking on the moon, early 70s, all the commentary was we're walking on the moon now. We will have colonies on Mars by the mid-1980s.

I remember, I remember the reports that came out and it was like, if we spend at the Apollo level, we'll have this amazing. Even if we cut it back by half, we'll still be on Mars in the 80s.

Yeah, but that if statement was yes, that's literally true. If you kept that Spending, but it was tone deaf of geopolitics. And space does not exist in a vacuum. Yes, it does, actually.

Sorry, you beat me to it.

Bad analogy there. Okay. Space spending does not exist independent of the geopolitics that drives it. So there's everyone thinking that we went to the moon because we're Americans and we're explorers and it's in our DNA and it's the next thing to do, and therefore Mars follows. No, Mars does not follow. Excuse me. No, that is not how any of this works. It's not how it has ever worked. We got to the moon, looked over our shoulder, the Russkies aren't there. And we said, we're done here. We're not going back to the moon. Stranding Apollo 18 and further missions.

Yeah, we had actually built the rockets. Apollo 18.

That's it. Stranding Apollo 18. All those rockets were built. But the budget gets cut. Is it because we lack the political will? No, it's because the geopolitical forces no longer stoked it. And so that's why we have not left low Earth orbit in 52 years. It's not because of the absence of political will. It's because it's an absence of a perceived enemy. So let's fast forward what happens. I'm on a presidential commission under W to assess how we're going to transition NASA from the Space shuttle into some future program. And we say let's phase out space shuttle money. Phase in a return to the moon. Let's do that. Okay. And we had it all laid out and then move on to Mars. It was called the Moon. Moon. The Moon. What's it?

Moon Mars Initiative. I remember it well.

No, no, yeah, I know, but the commission. Well, it was the Commission on the Future of the US Space Exploration Policy, but that was shortened to the Moon and Mars Commission. That's what it got shortened to. Anyhow, we advised Congress of this and then they costed it out. And it would cost like a trillion dollars to send people, by the way. A trillion dollars? Spent the same money for NASA every year over 30 years gets you basically a trillion dollars. So the number sounded heavy and impossible to reach, even though it was plainly laid out in front of us. So it languished. Plus the Bush haters said, send Bush to Mars. Okay, so then who replaces Bush? We have Obama. Okay, Obama does not pursue the moon. Who follows Obama? We have. Am I getting my years correct here? My presidents? Did I leave anybody out? Bush, Obama? Who came after Obama?

Well, Trump came in there at some point I know.

So what happens is, so Trump says, let's go back to the moon. And then the Trump haters say, no, send Trump to the moon. Fine. Then Biden comes in and preserves this scope for NASA. Now, why does that happen all of a sudden? How come it's a real thing? How come we have Artemis? Because China, we could have done this 50 years ago, 40 years ago, 30 years ago, 20 years ago. But we didn't. No. Why? Oh, we didn't. The geopolitics didn't force it. What happens? China says we're gonna put astronauts on the moon. All right? They just come shy of saying, we're gonna put military bases on the moon. We're gonna put astronauts on the moon. Oh, my gosh. All of a sudden, it's the right thing for us to do. And I'm gonna tell you this based on my read of. And by the way, all of this is in the book. Just. It's all in the book. Everything I'm telling you now is written, done. And I'm ready to talk about something else. But I'm telling you that if Elon's ships will ever fly to Mars, it's because China says, I'm making this up. But let any of them say, we want to put military bases on Mars, bada bing, we're going to Mars. We are going to Mars. And you know something? NASA doesn't really have a ship to do that. But you know who does? Elon Musk. So he rolls out his Mars ship and tax money, pays Elon for us to get to Mars. And it's not on his dime. It's not on his.

I get it. But I'm going to disagree in part here because the fact of the matter is Starship has been built on his dime. It's been built on.

Launched.

Yes, because it's been launched three times, not successfully, not to Mars, but the capability, wants it working, has the capability of refueling and going, and I hope that NASA does.

What I'm telling you is what I'm telling. Yeah, all there. What I'm saying is that as a Mars program, the cost of that goes beyond any venture capitalist interest in handing money to Elon, even his own money, unless he does it as a one off, as a vanity project and holding vanity projects aside from if his ships take us to Mars, it's because you're my tax money as voted in Congress for our geopolitical defense to protect our space interests against adversaries. You know, that's what's gonna unfold here.

Knowing him well enough, he will spend every one of his last dollars making a mission to Mars happen, even if the government doesn't want it. In fact, you know, I remember I.

Was, that's a one off vanity project.

Well, but listen, a lot of times.

I don't have a problem with that. I'm just saying, don't tell me it's a business case.

No, it's not a business case, by no means. This is a backup humanity vision for him. Now that wasn't the conversation I wanted to have with you because I'm not a huge Mars fan. I mean, I love the idea of going to Mars and finding the life that's soil there.

By the way, this idea that it's Mars, the idea that it's Earth 2.0 is, is that has serious flaws in it. I'd be happy to chat about that with you if we have time, but continue.

Yeah. So the point is, when we talk about where does humanity expand to next? Right. If we're going to start to see millions of people, not thousands of people, millions of people in space, where or when I say in space, beyond the Earth's surface, where are we going to see that? We'll see some large populations of scientists and researchers on the moon, maybe some vacation spots on the moon, but I think it's unlikely to be on Mars. My bet still is on the vision that Gerard K. O' Neill painted of large cylinders built from asteroidal materials at this point built by robotics and AI autonomously without humans in the loop, creating ideal environments for us to go into and move into without having to worry about all of the issues of getting onto and off of the Martian surface.

Yeah. So let me just say some supportive things of what you just said. The Gerard K. O' Neill model, as you noted, has the advantage that you park one of these at a Lagrangian point or somewhere in orbit. And so it itself does not have much of any of a gravitational well. So you just sort of slide up next to it and disembark. And since it's rotating as a rotating cylinder, everybody lives on the inner surface of that cylinder and it's rotated to 1G. You don't have the bone loss problems or any other health problems related to lower G as you would have on the Moon, as you would have on Mars. Which is those kinds of challenges were thoroughly explored in the TV series Sci Fi Story Expanse. If you look at any Expanse episodes, there are the people who live on Mars, there are people live on asteroids and their bones are weaker and they can't travel from one place to another because they were born and raised in these different sources of gravity. And Earth in that mix has the heaviest gravity. So the Earth people tend to be sort of sturdier than everybody else. So there's been some sci fi people have thought about this. It's completely bypassed when you have a rotating system. So the question would be, how idyllic will you make this such that everyone will just want to go? Will it be like, oh, the new world is so amazing, Everybody get in a ship and board one way and you'll get off and you'll never come back? Is that what you foresee and in how much time?

Yeah, so I do foresee one way missions. In fact, I've done this in the lecture halls at universities. Typically for young graduate students in early 20s asking how many of you would go on a one way mission to the Martian surface? And you know, before they're married or before they have responsibilities, the percentage of hands that go up in the audience is pretty large, close to 50%.

By the way, there was the Project Mars one. Do you remember that?

Yes, I do remember that.

Weinsdrop was the entrepreneur. He's Dutch, which was interesting because I said, how does a Dutch person get involved in this? And then I realized there was the Dutch East India Trading Company. They were early out of the box in this. Let's explore the unknown business. And of course they have since gone out of business, even though they had many supporters, many funders. I had Baz Langdrup on my podcast, it's in our archives. And we interviewed one of the people who did sign up. He was a young, kind of geeky guy, liked science. And we asked him, and I said, so you really want to go one way on this trip? And he said, and he said yes. And I said, aren't you married? And he said, yes. Well, what is. I said, what does your wife say about this? And he said, oh, she's encouraged it. You don't understand what's going on in your marriage.

Good riddance, good riddance.

So yeah, I get that, but. And maybe Elon with his starship, that's a first step. But to say we will have robotic AI mining asteroids, building colonies enough for all of us to move there and live there, on what timescale are you imagining this, by the way? Jarkay O' Neill imagined all of this by the 21st century.

Yeah, he wrote his books in the mid late 80s. And so I thought it was even earlier. I think it was earlier High Frontier was earlier. It was in the mid-70s. You're right. You wrote 2084, which is his follow on. I mean I see this occurring in the next 30 years, which might be completely ridiculous on your timescale, but I think that the abilities to do this will be there.

By the way, 30 years ago was 1994.

Yes, predictions in context. But we are on a nonlinear curve. I would say.

Yes, we are. Would love to talk about that. It's part of your professional identity to be on that exponential. I mean you made a career out of that. So I applaud you for this.

Thank you. But space has been heretofore slow, risk.

Averse and government driven than what our predictions were. But other things. By the way, not everything is on an exponential, but overall society is. That's the point. So if you look at the future that never was, everyone's visions of the future, no, we don't have flying cars and all the rest of that because everyone imagined that energy would be cheap. But what the future brought was cheap information. So we have an information driven economy, more than an energy driven economy, transportation driven economy. And everything we have in our information world, nobody foresaw. Okay. Even the best of the, of the, of the futurists. So, okay, I mean this for so pieces of it, okay, but so our advances are not on the, on the line that most people are drawing where they would rather have it be.

But there are changes now. First of all, to point out that from May of 1961 when JFK said let's get to the moon through July of 1969 was extraordinary because of the will and because of the 400,000Americans that joined the Apollo program in one shape or form.

And engineers and scientists.

Engineers. Scientists and politicians. But what we have today is 3D printing of Rocket components. We do have the ability to AI model things. We do have the ability for new material sciences. We have a whole slew of technologies that if we need it to go faster. And I think commercial industry, when it's talking about a profit motive or a business motive, needs to go fast and efficient as compared to the government.

The.

Because let me ask you this. From my point of view, NASA is a government works project that keeps the DoD companies employed during peacetime. That's the way I think about it. And it's not about.

That's a more cynical view, which I'm.

Not typically cynical, but on this subject.

I get that you're definitely not a cynical guy. So the fact that you went cynic there, that says something And I, and I'm not even going to argue that. What I will say, however, is NASA with all the pyramid below it, that has to be all the moving parts that run 10 NASA centers and all the rest of the machinery that NASA is. It continues to be the singular agency that is at the frontier of space exploration. It's not clear that that will be replaced by commercial space exploration because the active exploration almost inherently means there's not a profit, there's not an ROI expected for it, as long as they're not an roi. The motivation then falls on the shoulders of geopolitics rather than on private enterprise. What happens is private enterprise comes later and then they do it more cheaply. But they're not going to be the first to invest, by the way. They can be the first to invest in something if it's not that much money. But if you're talking the level of money that space involves, I do not see private enterprise leading anything.

So it depends what the rules are, right? Because everything we hold of value on Earth, metals, minerals, energy, real estate is in near infinite quantities in space. But if you can't own it and can't create a market for it, then private enterprise isn't going to be able to invest and capitalize on it.

I'm not saying private enterprise has no place in space. I'm saying they just won't do it first, that's all.

Okay, fair. Fair enough.

I don't see evidence of that. I'm not wishing this were the case. I'm simply declaring that my observation of the delusions of space enthusiasts of the past 65 years tells me that the disconnect comes about because people say we can do it, therefore we will. No, just because you can do something doesn't mean all the forces are aligned for it to happen at all. At all. And before we went to the Moon, people thought it was impossible. Now no one is thinking landing on another planet is impossible. So what's in our way is not the technology, it's the actual motivation that would fund who would do it first. That's all I'm talking about.

I understand the incentive business very, very well.

Yeah, and sometimes you have to incentivize, as you've brilliantly done with the X Prizes and all the other prizes you've conceived and put into motion. It's how we. How we met 35 years ago.

40 years ago. My God, it was 30 years ago. And just to tell that story, I had just come up with the idea of the X Prize, the first one for spaceflight.

And I knew this before you knocked on my door and.

And yes, literally. And I read in the back of the science fiction Penguin books that there were these tear out sheets that you could sign up for a trip to Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and maybe even Pluto since it was a planet back then. And you would submit your name and address and information in this form for a raffle and submit it to the Hayden Planetarium where I was recently appointed as chair. Yes.

So I was brand new in that office. Yes.

And I'm thinking to myself, okay, everybody who submitted their name would be a perfect individual for me to go and hit up to help fund my X prize for space flight.

And that was from the 1950s.

That wasn't exactly as clear to me at that point when I knocked on your door. And I'm like, hey, Dr. Tyson, do you happen to have a database of all the people who signed up for this?

Because I. Archives of everyone who signed up, yeah. So it turns out we were able to recover a small box of them.

You pulled out a shoebox.

It was a shoebox, yeah. I didn't know anything about it. Right. This is your. So that was a clever sort of ploy. But you know, that's back when addresses didn't even have zip codes. Most of them were still alive.

Naive. I was. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side. You go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage, three or four going on and you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic Centers. We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body mri, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our eyes and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. You might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com Peter When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller LifeForce, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com Peter will put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is for me one of the most important things I offer my Entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com Peter it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. Here is a next story that surfaced this week. So large amounts of water appeared to be subsurface on Mars. Are you tracking the story?

No, I'm not. But we expect that Mars clearly, if you look at its surface today, there is no end of visual evidence of there once having been running water. They're meandering riverbeds, river deltas, flood plains, all the telltale signs of, of erosion caused by slowly flowing water and rapidly flowing water. And Mars is bone dry today. You have to ask where did the water go? And the bedding person's suggestion was that it was sunken into the beneath the surface as a permafrost and you just have to go down there and melt it. Or there could be some pockets, if there's any energy source at all that would maintain water in liquid form. And if that's the case, that would be a very high target for the search for life because everywhere on Earth where we find liquid water, we find life. Including the Dead Sea. Dead Sea, because whoever named it didn't have a microscope.

I'm going to, I'm going to put on your, your betting man's hat.

So.

Probability that there is life of any type on Mars today, where do you put that.

Today? That's a little harder. Whether there was once life, sure, life got started on Earth pretty quickly. Within about 100 billion years of the earliest moment it possibly could have formed. And that's not very. Did I say 100 billion? Sorry, 100 million years. That's a very short interval of time.

Compared to about half. About half a billion years after the Earth was formed. Right. So four and a half billion years ago. Four billion years ago.

You know, in the early textbooks, they dated the earliest fossil evidence of life from the formation scenario of the Earth. That would have given you 600 million years or so. But that's not fair to life because Earth was hot. Earth was higher than what could sustain complex molecules. So give it a chance, please. Okay, so Earth cools down. Then you have a period of heavy bombardment. You heat it up again. That's leftovers from the formation of the solar system that has to cool down. Now you can start making complex molecules.

But you haven't answered my question. Oh, what, what's the probability today, if you had to put, you know, as a betting man, that life exists subsurface.

Permafrost, maybe 50, 50 microbial life? Definitely nothing more complex than that because you can't be highly complex life and navigating rocks inside the rocks. And we can't call it soil because it's not soil, but the regolith of Mars. You can't. You have to be small enough to. To be able to make that your home. And that would be microbial life. So I may be 50, 50 microbial life, but I don't think anything more complex than that.

Now, the next question is, we know that ejecta from asteroid impacts on the Martian surface reaches the Earth and the lunar surface as well, and the lunar surface seem cool.

I know where you're going with this, but let me slip something in.

Okay, sure.

It goes both ways. It goes all ways. Right. A lot of asteroids moving through space were ejected rocks from their home planet. That means there could be rocks from Earth that are meteorites on the moon. And if that's the case, we could find fossilized evidence of Earth life in meteorites on the Moon. That's a whole other project that somebody needs to undertake.

Well, I think when you make your trip there, you should go out fossil fault.

I'll do that.

But the point, and you know where I'm going with this, is Mars cooled first being further from the Earth.

Well, and also being smaller. When you're smaller and being smaller, you have a higher surface area to volume ratio. And whenever that happens, you will cool. So a small potato will cool faster than a big potato after you pull them out of the oven. So Mars is one tenth our mass, something like that. And you know, one, what is it, one third, one half, one, two and a half our size. And so you. It will cool way faster than Earth does. But go on.

So the question, of course, is, is Earth life actually Martian life? Did it form on Mars first and then did ejecta from the Martian surface reach the Earth and begin a process here?

Yeah, as crazy as that idea sounds, it's completely plausible.

Yeah.

Because if Mars formed early, cooled earlier, formed light, and it had water, formed life earlier than Earth formed life, and we're still living in a active early period of Earth's solar system where impacts were more common than they are today, it is completely rational to suspect that or even logical to suspect that a rock on Mars where microbial life living in the nooks and crannies of that rock, moves through space after having been ejected and finds Earth's gravity lands on Earth, spawning life on Earth. Now, very important here, many people misunderstand evolution. Let me just make it clear. In evolution, no animal adapts to anything. It either survives the change or dies. It does not adapt. Okay? What happens is at any given generation, the of a species, there's variation, typically in what is born, and that variation is random. And if there's an assault on the environment that favors one of those variations, then that variation will walk through that portal into that new environment and all the rest die. None of them adapted to anything. Adaption sounds like it's an active thing that you are doing on purpose. That is not how any of this works. I say this because the rock going through space, where there is no water, there is high radiation, there is high temperature coming out and landing, and there's cold temperature. All of these are forces operating on all the microbes. Most microbes will die. If any microbe happen to have resistance to radiation, to pressure, to temperature, it will survive.

Yes.

And on Earth, you look around, is there anybody who has this kind of resistance on Earth? And you can't help but look at the top of that list and you get the tardigrade water bear this microscopic. You can't kill this thing, okay? You can radiate it, you can freeze dry it. You withhold water from it, it curls up and waits around. Like, however long it takes for water to show up again, it pops back to life.

The ultimate astronaut.

Where the hell did this creature get these abilities? Because it certainly wasn't on Earth. Because these forces operating for its survival would have been the properties of space. Now, we don't think it came from space. But that's an example of how you would reason, go through the reasoning about whether something on Earth came from Mars because it has to get through space first.

And of course, on Earth we see all these extremophiles in the hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean, at the point of volcanic eruptions. We see things in the coldest places on Earth.

So that's a reminder that unlike how you and I learned biology in our textbooks, you don't need the 72 degree tide pool where everything's just right. Life can thrive in far greater range of environments than we were ever taught in the early days of learning about life on Earth. And if that's the case, of course that opens up the options for places in the universe that previously we might have thought to be hostile to life. Where you can find microbes just doing the backstroke because they love the extreme environments. Like you said, we have a whole term for them. They, they call the extremophiles. But here's the point. If we go to Mars, the two.

Scenarios, when we go to Mars.

When we go to Mars, Mr. Optimistic Man.

Oh, come on. Do you think there's. Okay, listen, we could end as a species, that's true. But at some point somewhere, if we.

Go to Mars, it's because the military forces of the world required it of us.

You and I will continue to differ on that point.

Yeah, but I have the evidence of history on my side. You have wishful thinking on your side. That's the difference here. That's all I'm saying.

We have individual explorers who've charted paths.

Yeah, but going to Mars is not an individual explorer. That's a trillion dollars right there.

A trillion dollars.

Hundreds of billions of dollars. It's not private money making that happen.

So this next topic here, I'll tell you, I'll remember when I was with Elon on a particular day, he was extremely glum. And I'm like, why are you so glum? And he goes, just figured out that Falcon 9 cannot get us to Mars. And he said, I have to stop and I need to build something bigger. And Starship was designed not for the lunar program, it was designed for going to Mars and retrofitted for the Moon Mars initiative. But how do you fund this thing? And Starlink is his venture to fund this thing. How do you get a trillion dollars in value? You plug into a large consumer base engine, economic engine, which is communications. And I think he's doing pretty damn good. I'm not sure. I actually switched to T Mobile. On this note.

It'S very loyal of you.

I know, I know. Well, the idea of communicating over Starlink is pretty cool.

Okay, so I was recently on a ship circumnavigating Iceland, and we crossed the Arctic Circle, where there are no cell phone towers. And all of our Internet there was via Starlink. And that was the first time I was on Starlink. Bandwidth is very modest, like 1Mbps, but enough to do email and not to stream 4K video. But it definitely enabled communication. So, of course, Starlink's greatest value is where you don't otherwise have typical cell phone communications. So we can ask the very simple question, how many people will be served by star length at very high latitudes? And that number is vanishingly small compared to everybody else who's served by cell phone towers.

I'll tell you, I use it on my airplane when I fly things because the cell phone towers are there, just not in communication. So how many people.

Okay, Right, right. So, yeah, sorry. At high or high elevation. Yes. So. So again, you are. Can I just back up for a minute? You mentioned President Kennedy's speech. So you may remember Kennedy gave two speeches. The first was to a joint session of Congress in May 1961, as you correctly remembered. Then he gave a speech the next year, 1962, a little more fleshed out with the idea of going to the moon. But that original speech, which we remember, we will put a man on the moon before the decade is out and return him safely to Earth. This sort of thing. You can even hear his Brookline, Massachusetts accent saying it. Right. That's how. That's how resonant those words are in so many of us. That's fine. And you realize in Kennedy Space Center, Florida, there's a bust of Kennedy. And in the granite next to the bus are those very words chiseled in there. It is. But man on the moon before the decade, they say, ah, we had leaders back then with visionaries. And. And then. Excuse me, excuse me. Go back a few paragraphs in that speech. Nobody does that. Why don't they? Let's find out what else he said that day.

What did he say that day to.

A joint session of Congress before he said, let's go to the moon? He says, if the events of recent weeks could not utter the man's name, Yuri Gagarin, okay. Who had just come out of orbit, could not utter his name. If the events of. I'm paraphrasing. If the events of recent weeks are any indication of the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, then we need to show the world the path of freedom over the path of tyranny. That was the battle cry against communism. And that's actually what wrote the Czechs. Not the stirring rhetoric about how wonderful it would be to explore the moon. It was. We were scared witless that the godless communists would get the new high ground. So let's be honest with ourselves. And when people don't recall that part of the speech, that's part of the delusional state that we occupy when we try to make predictions about the future. Yeah, we'll be on Mars. If China says they want to set up base camp, then we're going to Mars. If China doesn't do that, my read of history tells me we're never going to Mars.

So I hear you, my friend, I hear you. And I think that you're right on so many levels. But I still believe we have moved from the era where only governments and large corporations could do things at this scale to the point where entrepreneurs and individuals can do things. It used to be the kings and the queens and robber barons. The only person who could possibly, you know, change the world. And today individuals are, and that will always be my, my belief.

Individuals, just to be clear, individuals have always changed the world. So I don't want to under, under.

Celebrate, but there is, there is a.

Different, There's a different boogeyman. Don't run around with a trillion dollars and they just spend it all. They, they change the world with their views, with their, with their spirit energy to convince people that some things we should be doing.

Well, let's look at the railroads. Let's look at the oil industry, but they were underwritten by the Rockefellers and such. Yes, there was economic engines there and there need to be economic engines.

Excuse me, who protected the railroads? It was the US Cavalry. Excuse me, just. The government was totally in that. You sound like Newt Gingrich who was a very big railroad analogist. If I may, where he said if we'd given the NASA's money to private enterprise, we would have been on the moon ten times over. No, no. There's complete economic value to land that you're gonna take from the Indians. This was the entire movement and land and minerals and so. So denial.

There is one. I understand the need for a boogeyman, to use that term. There is another one out there. You know, many years ago I flew Stephen Hawking into zero G. Do you remember that?

I don't. I didn't know you were part of that. But I did know he was zero.

G. Yeah, thanks for doing that.

That was, you know, he, that's, he needed to do that. And that's.

Yeah, it was, it was my company, Zero Gravity Corporation, we fly these parabolic flights. And it's another overnight success after 11 years of hard work. Started at 93.

Finally. And I bet it didn't cost you a trillion dollars. Cost you a lot of money, but not a trillion dollars.

So in 2006, after the Ansari X Prize was won, it was won in 2004. But two years later, I find myself on the phone with Professor Hawking on his computer and with his administrative assistant nurse. And he is asking me the question whether I can fly him on a suborbital flight into space. I say, I'm sorry, Professor Hawking, I can't do that, but I can fly you on a zero G flight. And I thought, taking the world's expert in gravity into zero gravity, what could be better? Long story there different podcast episode that I recorded on Zero G. When he is at the Kennedy Space center, when we're getting ready to take off, he agrees to do a pre flight press conference. And we had no idea how he would do on this flight. Right. He's very frail, his lungs, his ribs. We had a whole emergency room medical center on the flight. And in the pre flight press conference, he was asked the question, you don't.

Want headlines, Peter Diamandis kills world famous.

Yes, yes.

That was bad PR for Zero days.

Believe me, believe me. I had the FAA telling me I couldn't. I was disallowed from doing the flight after I'd spent 11 years. And I said, why? And they said, your operating specifications require you to only fly able bodied people. And I had the presence of mind to ask, well, who determines whether they're able bodied? And the FAA person said, well, I guess a flight doc or his physicians. I said, great, I bought malpractice for those individuals, got them to write letters to the FAA that he was able bodied to fly into zero g. And they basically said, it's your ass, good luck.

That's right. But they got their paperwork. So their ass is covered by the paperwork.

Exactly. So long story short, we're at the pre flight press conference and he's asked, why are you doing this? And he goes, given all the paraphrasing it, all the risks humanity has from nuclear war and pandemics, he didn't include AI there. He said, I don't think the human race has a future unless we expand our presence out into space. The problem is that's not a clear and present danger on the topic. People's minds like Russia, Soviet Union or China. But it is an important element, right? This is what Elon keeps on going. We have to spread the light of consciousness beyond the planet.

Yeah, I would. So I don't know if you want to talk about that now, but I'm happy to. I would ask, please, why do you want to do that?

In case the Earth should be, or humanity should be wiped out by some existential threat.

Such as? Give me your top three.

Asteroid approaching us from the sun before we had a chance to see it. Nuclear Armageddon. A well engineered killer virus pandemic.

Okay, so everything you just said makes complete sense and makes perfectly readable headlines. Put all your eggs in one basket. Everyone understands that principle. Okay, I have a more practical view of all of this.

Please tell me which is.

It seems to me that whatever it takes to terraform Mars and ship a billion people there, that seems to me to be more effort than finding all dangerous asteroids and deflecting them. Just seems to me.

Just saying.

I'm just spitballing here. Okay. It seems to me that if we trash Earth with climate change or there's some killer virus, it seems to me that medical research to find a perfect antiviral serum, given our access to the human genome and with AI assisted understanding proteins and whatever else. It seems to me that is a more realistic plan than shipping a billion people to Mars in case one planet gets taken out that way. The reality of this for me is I would love to go to Mars, but not because if we go to Mars, then half of all humans will die and we protect the remaining. Like what? Really? No. You want to save all humans no matter where we are. And if you can do that to Mars, every possible scenario we can think of today is trivial to solve. It seems to me compared with what you want to accomplish by shipping a billion people. Or.

Let's begin. I'm not saying a billion, and I'm not a Mars fan, whatever is the number. But I am.

You're going to have to terraform Mars if you want to. Like. Like Elon wants to do. Yeah, well.

Or we need to back up some. Some significant population off. Off planet. Now listen, I have read maybe too many science fiction books and looking for and looking for and looking for and looking for a rationale to fund our. Our space programs. But you know, we are, you know, thousands of years from now, millions of years from now, whatever we evolve to, we're going to look back at these next few decades as the moment in time that the human race moves irreversibly off the planet. Right. We are the lungfish equivalent, and that's part of evolution.

Is our lungfish the first creature to.

Move out of the oceans onto land? Yes. So I think that is in our. It's not a genotype. It is a phenotype of humans to desire to explore and to.

I agree, but by the way, you're mixing two highly separable variables there. One of them is we want to go to Mars because it's cool, and we're going to explore and we're going to be the lungfish leaving Earth, going to Mars. Cool, let's do it. But if you're motivated by saying let's do that so that half the humans will die while the other half survives and, and we're not gonna save everybody, that's for me, that.

No, no, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying it's the consequence of what you're saying. This is insurance policies. This is insurance policy.

That's what I uttered. I uttered the insurance policy for the species. I'm saying by the time we can do that on Mars, all of your dreams of mining asteroids will be true. They'll all be true. And if we can mine asteroids, it's like, hey, mining company 807, we've detected an asteroid headed our way. Go to them and mine them to zero. Okay. Or deflect them. They'll have the ability to do this.

I. I sure. I sure hope so. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on biodefense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their rna? Well, a company called viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now, viome has a product that I've personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit and stool and can tell you so much about your health. They've tested over 700,000 individuals and use their AI models to deliver members critical health guidance, like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. As reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine. After just six months of following Biome's recommendations, members reported the following. A 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, VIOME is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com Peter I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine who's the founder and CEO of viome, to give my listeners a special day discount. You'll find it@viome.com Peter let's turn to a much more scientific conversation here. We've seen hearings in Congress, a number of hearings about UFOs. I'm curious, I mean, you must have been asked over and over again, what do you think of these? Seems like super credible individuals who are bringing forward what they believe as. As viable evidence for these unidentified flying objects. Not even called UFOs anymore, are they? They're called something.

UAPs.

Yeah, UAPs.

Unidentified Paranormal Anomalous Phenomena.

Okay.

Yeah. Who are they kidding? They mean UFOs. They're just trying to rebrand it to, to get rid of the giggle factor. So yeah, the government calls them UAPs. So. And I noticed that the news nation is saying, forget the uap. Let's go back to what Everyone knows what these are. So you want to think of they're interesting mysteries. I don't have any problem investigating mysteries. But if you want to think that the thing you don't know what you're looking at are visiting aliens from outer space, that's a leap. You can't go from I don't know what I'm looking at to I definitely know what I'm looking at. I'm looking at aliens. You can't do that because you're replacing certainty. You're replacing ignorance with certainty in the absence of anything to bridge that gap. So these are fun. I'd be curious. I have other questions. Like why is it that the James Webb Space Telescope can produce high resolution color images of gas clouds 7,000 light years away, yet the best evidence we have for aliens is monochromatic fuzzy Tic Tac in restricted airspace on Earth, seen only by the US Navy. That's a little weird to me. And by the way, it's in our own atmosphere and that's the best image they can produce. That's a little weird to me. So, other thing, at any given moment you surely know a million people are airborne. A million with a window. And there's six, at least 6 billion smartphones in the world, each capable of high resolution photos and videos. If we were being invaded by aliens, we have the capacity to crowdsource that phenomenon. Cat videos go viral overnight. If you get any picture of an alien or their spaceship with the detail you'd expect from high resolution photography, oh my gosh, the world will know about it overnight. Overnight. But that's not what's happening here. So all of a sudden we're thinking that the Pentagon has special access to aliens. Really? Really. We have people everywhere on Earth, even places where the Pentagon isn't. And no, we don't see. So we have fuzzy images. Fine, keep, keep looking for them. I don't want to stop people's enthusiasm for this. I don't know what that is. Go figure it out. But I'm just thinking, if we were being invaded by aliens, we would not require congressional hearings to establish that fact.

I love it.

By the way, one of the testifiers back last summer said he had non human biologics. Yes, in a locked box in the back. And you know, I take people at their word. You know, what would a non human biologics be? Well, take the tree of life with everything on it, all the plants, animals, fungus, insects, everything, and remove the branch that are humans. And everything else would be non human biologics. So he could have tree bark in his, in his lockbox for all I know. Based on that kind of testimony, Neil.

I want to switch us over to another subject that is making the headlines heavily and it's AI. How do you feel about AI safety? What are your thoughts? Are you concerned about the speed at which AI is progressing?

I'm not uniquely concerned about AI relative to any other highly powerful bit of technology, science, engineering that we have brought upon ourselves in the history of civilization. So no, I'm not uniquely worried. I think there should be constraints. Yes, there should be. But the constraints need to be established by people who know what they're constraining. It can't just be some members of Congress who read a few headlines and now they want to pass legislation based on a fear factor. It has to be intelligently reasoned, debated, of course. And by the way, you need politicians in that debate because politicians are our collective representatives and so they carry some of the fears or the joys of the citizenry. But you would have this conversation to find out what would be taking AI too far. And let's put constraints make that illegal to Take it too far. What would be just right? And then you have examples of what would be just right.

So this week, California legislature approves a bill with sweeping AI restrictions. I find, you know, listen. Safety standards requiring large scale AI companies undergo safety testing before deployment. Fantastic. In fact, OpenAI Anthropic have volunteered to do this. Transparency.

Great.

But this is interesting. Worker protections protecting workers and call centers from being replaced by AI.

Well, that would be ripe for Republicans to argue against. Okay, that's. That's like a, that's, that's like raw meat for a Republican. I. That I think is naive.

Yes.

That would be like passing a law saying we have to protect all auto workers from these bots that are now assembling our cars. That, you know, had you done that, then we would have trailed the world in an entire industry and the industry would have gone out of business. So there's certain. That looks a little naive to me. And so. Oh, by the way, you and I are old enough to remember that when cars were made by humans, there was a very real chance that in the morning your car wouldn't start. Okay. I was showing a movie to my son from. The movie was from like the 70s. And the bad guys are running to get away and they get in the car and they try to start the car and it doesn't turn over. And my son said, didn't they have gas in the car? It's not. He can't think that. Why would a car not start? Of course it's gonna start. It's a machine that works perfectly. Right. So. So cars are lighter, faster, better, more fuel efficient than they've ever been. And they're all made by robots. One has to think about. If you want to be proactive about it, what you should say is, what new job opportunities will AI bring to us? Rather than complain about what jobs it replaces. Just to keep that in mind, by the way, Hollywood went through this brilliantly. Okay? The strikes that happened was it a year ago, just coming out of COVID were part of those, those arguments. And I'm a member of sag, aftra, the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Radio and Television Artists. The two unions had joined together because I, I had some cameos. Not that I'm a big time actor, of course I'm not. And I don't know how to act, but I can be myself as a cameo in a tiny. As I have been in a few movies. But one of their concerns was they don't want a movie studio that has access to your video record. To now recreate your character and your voice for a role that you don't even have to show up for. And even more so than that is the concern. Let's say I have 20 seasons of law and Order, right? And I have staff writers that wrote them all. I get an AI bot to ingest all 20 seasons and I say write me 20 more seasons on this topic, that topic, that topic in the style that these previous 20 had been written. Well, that's clearly intellectual property theft at that level. And so this all had to be hammered out. And it was.

Let me ask you because this is interesting, right? The disruption of the hegemony of Hollywood is. Is coming because we're not far, if we're not there already from the studio saying, I'm going to create my own stars and starlets and we're going to own them and they're going to be fully digital and we're going to make our movies based on them. We're going to create.

Cartoons are. That's what cartoons are.

But when they become lifelike or. Or we're gonna bring back Merlin, Wingman.

Those are animated characters. They're animated movies. Disney created the Lion King. So what's your point? Somebody gets money for the voice. Okay, of course, that was James Earl Jones, okay, as Mufasa. But the character. Disney owns the characters. So what's different to you about this?

Only that they are photorealistic human characters that would obviate the need for actors at some point in the future.

Okay, So I wonder if that's an interesting future. I wonder if they would ever become as popular as real human being actors where the press, you know, where TMZ follows them when they come out of the restaurant or, you know, if you're not an actual living thing. Is there lifestyles of the rich and famous. Will anyone have any interest at all? I bet not.

So let's take a look at this. This is out of.

Slides here.

This is fascinating for me. So let's check this out here. So the ability of AI to create effectively. Total disinformation. So do you imagine we're going to head towards a future of defaulting to disbelief?

Yes, yes. In fact, I foresee. So my big prediction here, I predict that we are within 5 years or less, possibly 3 of an Internet where the deep fakes are so good that even people who believed that fake news was real will no longer believe the fake news. Okay, Think about it. Think about it.

We're defaulting to disbelief.

So the people who believe the fakes will no longer believe the fakes because they'll think the fakes are faked. Okay. Those who thought the fakes were real will no longer believe that the fakes are real because they'll think the fakes are fakes. The day that happens will represent an implosion of information integrity of the entire Internet. And that'll be its tombstone. The Internet, you know, 1994 to 2028. Rest in peace. And all that will remain are cat videos and other entertaining postings, which is how we all were baptized in into the Internet 30 years ago. It will no longer be a source of objective truth, of objective information. And we'll have to resort to books. Oh my gosh. Or actual one on one interviews, things like that. That is the future. Yeah. And it'll be its own fault, right? Or with the rules and regulations. It will be a crime to have a deep fake that is not otherwise watermarked as such.

Counterfeiting. Counterfeiting rules.

You're found out, then you are sent to prison. So you can't stop people from doing nefarious things, but you can have a penalty for them if they do. And maybe that will help rein some.

Of this in real quick. I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously. Called One Skin, it was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10amino acid sequence that is a senolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. Have you been tracking the humanoid Robot Wars?

I'm not into humanoid robots. I think it's a waste of time.

Really.

I won't tell other people it's a waste of time, but personally, you know, I don't go on, on the airwaves or on the Internet posting my opinions because I don't care whether anybody shares my opinion at all.

Okay, well, I care whether you're what your opinion is here. So why do you think I think that it's a waste of time?

Thank you. Thank you, Peter. To build a humanoid implies that there's something useful about a humanoid, when in practically anything we need a human to do, we can make a machine that does it better. And the machine doesn't look human right on down to the running blades of sprinters who don't have feet. Okay. I remembered in elementary school my teacher saying, oh, the human body is so well designed and the feet are all, every bone in the right place and tendon and ligament and it's perfect for walking and running and keeping our balance. The people don't have feet. You give them blades, they can run faster than they would have without feet. So the idea that the human form is something to emulate I find to be shortsighted. Because if you want to get tasks done, to have a human do the task. No, no. You go to remember the Jetsons. Okay, the Jetsons. Remember. Oh, by the way, 2022, that year, all evidence shows that that's the year George Jetson was born. Sharing that with you. And that was the year of Soylent Green took place.

Interesting.

But in the Jetsons he had a car that he flew. At the time, no one would imagine a self driving car. They would imagine a humanoid robot who would drive the car for you. Just take out the middleman, take out the middle bot and the car is the robot. And you know something? It's in the shape of a car because that's what you needed to do. Well, this hunt to get a human, I don't. Other than to help autistic children relate to humans. If you can get out of that uncanny valley, sure. But for the utility of a robot to be in a human form, I don't see that taking on at all.

Do you want to hear the argument for it?

Please.

So we are running a global 100 and $510 trillion GDP and right now half that GDP is labor and it's human labor. The projections that I showed you that Image of the three top robot companies, domestic or 1x and optimus by Tesla and figure two by figure, their price.

Point target's no longer in the running there. Japan.

Japan. There are about 30 well funded humanoid robot companies and there's many in China. China's got the problem that it based its entire economy on labor rates. And labor rates are going up and people are no longer manufacturing in China. They're manufacturing domestically with 3D printers and local manufacturing improvements and so forth. And China's also got the issue of an aging population without the one child policy. Basically left half the grandparents without a kid to take care of.

You have to bit them in the ass.

Yeah, yeah. So these robots, there's Unitree out of China, which is a $16,000 robot. So the numbers right now are trending towards a $20,000 price tag. For one of these robots, if you look at it on a price per kilogram, which I think is a reliably, let's call it $40,000 per robot. So you're able to or lease a robot for $100, $200 per month. I can think of a thousand things like cleaning up my house, doing the laundry, mowing the lawn, just anything that I don't need to do. If these robots are driven by multimodal AI that are just helping around the projections right now, maybe off, but on the order of by 2040, somewhere between 1 to $10 billion, 1 to 10 billion humanoid robots on the planet.

That means as many humanoid robots as humans.

That's what I would mean more than Elon's predictions. And God knows he is not always right, but he thinks more prevalent than cars on the planet, but having one of these sort of multimodal full utility capabilities that gives your AI arms and legs to do things right, like, you know, please take care of everything in the house, go shopping, go get these things for me. You know, the one thing that we humans all have in common is 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week. And the wealthy differentiate from the poor by having other people to do things for them or the ability to save time by hopping on a private jet. So I think these are time savers. And the ability to make yourself multipresent, does that not have an appeal for you?

So this would be to put a person, a robotic person, in place of tasks that are not otherwise streamlined to happen without a person. So there would surely be a marketplace for that over some interval of time. But why not design a house? Why not design laundry that cleans itself or some.

Because building a humanoid robot that can do what a human do in a human environment that's driven by an AI at a human or above capability allows you to do everything without redesigning everything.

Yeah, no, I get that it's a universal interface. Designs change, Right? So I agree. But we're not going to not design everything forever. All right? So I'm going to say I don't want a robot. I'm going to find a way. I'm going to design my home so that I don't need the robot. Okay? I'm going to design my home so that I don't. I'm going to design my car so I don't need a robot to drive me to work. Oh, I have a self driving car. Right. This is my point. The self driving car is the single best, earliest example of to me why you will ultimately not need humanoid robots because you're going to build a thing that is itself the robot and doesn't look anything like a human.

Well, we call everything that works like this. We call the robot that cleans dishes a dishwasher.

Exactly.

We give it a name.

Are you gonna get a robot to load the dishwasher? Are you that fucking lazy?

Probably. Probably.

You remember on the Jetsons, the maid. I forgot her name.

Yeah, Rosie. Rosie.

Rosie, of course, Rosie. You know, she wore a little maid's apricot.

Neil, you've got a new book coming out in a few weeks. Tell me about it.

Thank you. Giving it a shout out. So it's. Oh, my gosh, this is. I almost well up when I comment on this.

This is emotional. This is deep.

Well, a little bit. A little bit. A little bit. My very first book.

Yes.

That I published back in the 1980s while I was in graduate school.

You were 18 at the time.

I have updated into the 21st century, and at the time I wrote a column and it was called Merlin, Merlin. And I created for Merlin. It's a different Merlin than your favorite Merlin, but it's similarly magical. This Merlin has lived for all of time. And if you ask Merlin, it was a question and answer column, you'd ask Merlin. Dear Merlin, I don't quite know how gravity works. And because Merlin has lived for all of time, Merlin just recounts a conversation with Isaac Newton, and you'll see the dialogue between the two of them as the reply to that question. And so this access through time and space has made for a much richer question and answer experience for the reader than I think would otherwise be possible. Well, it's called Merlin's Tour of the Universe, and my brother illustrated it, so he's an artist and there's sort of playful, fun, irreverent illustrations throughout.

Does he. Does he do this one as well?

Yes. No, no, he did it. He did the original. And so we update. You have to. A lot of science had to be updated, of course, because this was from 30 years, 35 years ago, but it was. I mean, I. Well up a little bit because reinhabiting the character of Merlin in this book, bringing it up to date, it was so joyous to have done it the first time and to do it a second time was even more so. And then I'm reminded that Merlin is actually sort of terse where necessary and witty and a little bit irreverent, and the answers are mostly short. And I realized that was my proving ground for my postings on Twitter. Okay. It was like I was being honed for that, for the short form commentary on the world.

You were just ahead of your time.

At the end of October. Merlin's tour of the universe.

Yeah, and it's. And I just checked and it's. You can. You can pre. Buy it on Amazon.

So pre order. Yeah, yeah. Okay, excellent. They got that. It only just would have just been listed there because we're just putting in the final touches.

So who's it for, by the way? Who'd you write it for originally and now?

Oh, no, no. I mean, it was. It was a question and answer column. So it tended to be a lot of retired people with like time on.

Their hands to, like, think of questions and curiosity.

Yeah, yeah, and curiosity. You know, retired people who. Who. Who were lifelong learners. But there's some very young people where the question was asked by the parent. Like one of them was apparently a four year old asked this via the mother. It was if. If. If rank can make rainbows, then can a moon make moonbows? Something like that. Right. It's a cute little thing. And there's also. Sometimes Merlin is. Is. Is prone to rhyme. All right, so if. If rhyming gives a better answer than otherwise. So. So I. Can I. Can I share one with you, please?

I'd love to.

This is the first time I'm talking about this.

Yeah, I love it in any platform.

First time I'm talking about it. So you get it first here.

Thank you.

Someone asked, dear Merlin, are red stars red because they're hotter than blue stars? Okay, the perfectly rational question. And so rather than just say yes or no, so Merlin just fleshes it out a bit. So here it goes. Hang on. On canvas with paint in the artist's school, it is red that is hot, and blue that is cool. But in science, we show, as the heat gets higher, a star will glow red like the coals of a fire. But raise the heat some more, and what is in sight, Behold, the star has turned bright white. But the hottest of all, Merlin says unto you, is neither red nor white when a star has turned blue.

Ah, that's beautiful.

The challenge there was making it astrophysically accurate.

You have a new career, my friend.

So blue hot is the hottest of all hot.

Yes.

As welders know, for example, and the stove that you turn on, that turns red hot, we think of that as the limiting hot. But if you kept increasing the heat, it would turn white hot, it would melt. But if you kept heating it, even in a melted state, it would start glowing blue hot. And that's what's going on in the stars anyhow, so this is just a fun romp, and I'm all verklempt Marlon.

Tour of the universe on your favorite book purchasing. Do you read the book as well for Audible? Are you gonna.

Oh, thank you. Yes, yes, yes. In fact, the company that's publishing the printed book cut their teeth as a. As an audio book company. It's called Blackstone Publishers. And so, yes, I read all the answers, but we got voice actors to be the people asking the questions.

That's great.

Plus, when Merlin has a conversation with Isaac Newton, we got to get a Brit in there with the Isaac Newton accent. You got to do that. So the conversations are split up that way.

One last topic before we jump. We're going to be seeing each other again again in about a month's time.

Yes. It's on my calendar. I look forward to that.

Yeah. This is the 30th anniversary of the X Prize, which we spoke about when you and I met some 30 years ago. And you're going to be on stage live with me, and we'll be recording.

Let your audience know. I've not gotten an invitation until now, and you've been doing this for 29 years. I just want your audience to know.

That I wanted to make it super special for you, my friend.

And 30 years is an interesting interval of time.

That's why I'm mentioning this. Yes. Because it's the subject of one of your other books. And we're gonna be talking 30 years ago and 30 years into the future.

Yeah, thanks. Oh, my gosh. Yes. 30 years. So in 2022, I published a book called Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. And it has all the wisdom that I've gleaned as a scientist in this world is in that book. And I could not have written it five years earlier. Ten years. I was not wise enough to bring pen to page for what's in that book. One of the chapters is, so it's what civilization looks like if you are scientifically literate and if you have a dose of cosmic perspective. And it's stuff in society, and all these paired words that we all argue about over Thanksgiving are the titles of chapters like Color and Race, Law and Order, Gender and Identity, Life and Death, Truth and Beauty. This. It goes on and on and on, and it's what those look like. If you are a scientist and you say, you know, you haven't evaluated all the evidence or you think you're evaluated but because what does a scientist do but load up all the evidence and let the evidence do the talking? But if you do the talking instead of the evidence, you're going to land in a place that does not match objective reality. So that's what the book is. One of the chapters is called Exploration and Discovery. And I spend half that chapter on this journey from 1870 to 2020 in 30 year increments, highlighting the fact that, that the world at the end of each 30 year increment is completely unrecognizable to the people at the beginning of that 30 year increment. The way we live, the way we communicate, the what we do with our time, what we care about is completely different. And I suppose one could have done a 20 year interval or a 50 year interval. 30 seemed about right. And so the fact that we're on a 30 year cusp here, that's interesting. So 30 years ago, we're talking 1994, I suppose, right?

Yes, exactly.

So a big point that I make is that almost every prediction made at the beginning of a 30 year period just comes out wrong. You just get it wrong. Because the advances going exponentially come from places no one is thinking they come from. I'll give an example and I give this in the book. In the year 1900, 30 years after 1870, that's when everyone talks about the year 2000. Right. Because it's 100 years hence, they draw pictures of what they imagine the future to be like. Here's one of them. You ready? There's a steamship coming onto shore. Because steamships in 1900 was the way to go crossing the Atlantic, the rage. The steamship comes onto the shore and railroad wheels pop into place and it goes straight onto a railroad to continue the cargo transportation. This was the future. You go straight from ships to rail. Oh my gosh, what else would it do? Oh, it had sidewalks that were on different levels and the sidewalks were. Were on rollers, which is so quaint. And everyone had personal balloons that were strapped under your arm, armpit, so you can float around and get places. Because blimps and dirigibles were all the rage. Okay, sorry. That is what they predicted for the year 2000, when three years later we'd have the airplane.

Yes.

Okay. You can't give away a blimp today. All right. So I do a deep dive into what people are doing at the beginning and at the end of these intervals. And it's freaking mind blowing what has gone on in the last 150 years. So when people Say, what's life gonna be like in 50 years or 30 in the year 2050? I'm saying give up. Don't even try. Go home. One last thing. I quote a guy from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in the year 1900. He works for the New York Central Railroad. So he's in the world of transportation. And by the way, what's going on? In 1900, the internal combustion engine car was just invented. The modern bicycle took final form. The country is crisscrossed with railroad steamships, dirigibles. He says we can scarcely imagine that progress in transportation in the 20th century will be as great as the progress we've made in the 19th century. That's gotta be the most boneheaded prediction ever made. Ever. Ever. So now maybe you're not one of these guys making these boneheaded predictions, because that was a reverse prediction. That was. It'll never be as advanced as we have it now. And you're trying to go the other way with your X prize, and, you know, maybe you land somewhere in the middle. But I'm betting in 1994, there are things happening today you had no idea would be going on in this world.

For sure. For sure. And as you said earlier, a lot of it has been in the digital information.

You're a future man. There's a future man walking this Earth. It's you. Okay? Money behind your future investments. So that's. You're not just writing a book, you know, of predictions and sitting back and waiting for people to say what comes true or not. You've got skin in the game, and so I applaud you for that.

Thank you, buddy. Where do people find you? Obviously. Startalk, if you have not yet listened to Star Podcast.

Yes. Startalk, please. Yeah, we, we. It's, it's, it's.

How long has it been going on? It's been.

Yeah, since 2009. So it's on the 15th.

It was one of the earliest podcasts out there.

It's one of the earliest, in fact. We were terrestrial radio before we were. Before podcasts were a thing. We also have a stint on television. Before Disney bought National Geographic, we were on National Geographic television. And so there are episodes that are there, but we've been going strong ever since, and it's bringing the universe down to Earth in a fun way. I have a co host who's a comedian.

Comedian, yes. He's a.

Who's a force of levity in the conversation. And my guests are a force of gravity. And I carry the control knob so there's the right mixture for everybody at all times.

And I see you on X occasionally on Twitter.

Yeah, I've been posting to X less often. The algorithms have changed. I have a huge following on X. It's like near nearly 15 million people. But with algorithms now, it's just what is the virality of what you post more than your following that's going to then view it? And we've had some highly viral postings from my podcast because we're now clipping the podcast and posting them on TikTok and Instagram. So X has become less of an object of affection for me in recent months and years than it had been.

Well, buddy, I am grateful for you in this universe and on this planet.

Thank you. But just to be clear, so I'm Neil degrasse Tyson on all platforms except for X, where there's too many letters to use up in your character allocation. So I'm Neil Tyson on Twitter, but Neil Degrasse Tyson everywhere else. And the podcast is Start Talk. So thanks for those shout outs.

Of course, buddy. I look forward to seeing you on the stage at Xprize Visioneering towards the end of October. And thank you for joining me, my friend. Great to see you.